8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions ䷀

Tag: getting older

Chapter List

  • Hobby Hope

    One piece of retirement advice I have been hearing for years—even though I am more than a decade away from officially hanging up my work hat—is get a hobby.

    My grandparents were knitters. My grandfather spent his life as a mail carrier working for the the postal service here in Canada. Then he retired and bought a whole lot of cheap yarn and made mittens for the neighbourhood kids. So. Many. Mittens.

    We spend our working years being productive for other people, for our employers, and suddenly it seems as if the default is keeping productive for ourselves and our sanity.

    I write in a similar overlapping topic about being Late & Ready, the ideas of picking up new skills late in life as a creative pursuit, what that means about our expectations, and what it contributes to the output. 

    But also I find myself thinking a lot about nurturing hobbies and creative life skills that will keep me active, happy and interesting when I’m the old grey-haired guy, it’s me, with his laptop in a cafe.

    I certainly won’t be running marathons anymore, so planning on having skills and interests that fit with my age, health capacity, and the demands of the craft is a two-sided coin of figuring out what works as age creeps in—and learning to start letting go of everything that doesn’t work.

    I’m just here pondering this stuff now, thinking aloud because I know it’s inevitable, but then maybe I don’t have a clue what’s really in store for me.

    Under the category of Hobby & Hope I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Late Ready

    Everyone starts somewhere, but some of us start later than others.

    There are a few hard realities of learning a new craft after a certain age. Heck, like almost anything there is a ticking clock for greatness. Me picking away at the piano at nearly fifty is almost certainly not going to open up a spot at The Juilliard School any more than my dabbling in urban sketching this late in life it going to give me the time and energy to pursue a scholarship at Emily Carr University.

    The reality is that after certain doors in life, close most of the world will almost certainly regard your pursuits of artistic and creative skill as little more than a retirement hobby.

    And maybe that’s fair.

    …but it also isn’t.

    Art, fiction, music, all of it is as much about translating life experience into something outside of our memories. Fine whiskeys are aged to make them better, so why not artists, too?

    I am on the fringes of an age category transition myself, looking at much of middle age as something I’ve been through and starting to think about not just age, but the general idea of starting on a creative path as a late entrant.

    I got into watercolour when I was older than my first instructor.

    I took up the violin at forty.

    I didn’t start seriously trying to play the piano until just a year ago.  

    And something tells me that my flailing sense of urgency about aging might be a wee bit overblown. 

    Under the category of Late & Ready I’ll be writing more on this topic as the months wear on.

  • Fifty Walks

    As I write these posts and use this blog as a weekday creativity exercise I am approaching fifty.

    (Don’t ask me! I don’t know how that happened either. I certainly don’t feel so old.)

    Many of my running friends mark milestones in age with a race distance to match. For me that would me running a fifty kilometre race before I roll over the odometer on my age. It is not necessarily impossible, but as I have informally stepped away from such long races (a post for another blog) it does not seem a good fit. 

    Instead, I have opted to celebrate and commemorate by trying to do fifty walks before I turn fifty.

    Loosely structured, those walks will follow a couple rules: they must be of a certain distance, need to contain something I would consider “exploration” and also they should present me with an opportunity to create. What this will almost always and usually mean is that I will be walking a photo expedition.

    I used to do these photo expeditions, as I called them, quite frequently: camera charged and ready, I would just go out into the suburban wilderness near where I live and snap hundreds of photos. No rules. No restrictions. No checklist. No forcing myself into boxes. Just taking photos for the sheer joy of exploring the craft.

    Some of my best pictures and much of my best learning happened when the only goal was fresh air and having an open mind to opportunity.

    Maybe what I’m really hoping to achieve with rekindling my long walks this summer isn’t so much about the walks but finding fifty opportunities to take photos.