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Looking For My Next Big Thing
By Richard Nantel | September 24, 2007
After helping my 75-year-old mother move out of the home where she and my father lived for 35 years, and sorting through a generation of broken toasters, no longer non-stick skillets, and 20 year-old bank statements, I’ve decided to get rid of non-essential stuff in my life.
In sorting through everything, I realized how fervently I immersed myself into a hobby years ago. For about 15 years, I was obsessed with fly fishing. The result of this obsession is more than a hundred books on fishing strategy, storage bins of feathers to tie flies, and bamboo culms and specialized tools to build rods. I dove very deeply indeed into the world of catching fish on a fly.
When it came to learning about fly fishing, I was most definitely in the flow. Time would stand still while I was sanding a strip of bamboo or tying a fly. At night, I’d lay in bed visualizing myself on a cool trout stream outwitting the largest and smartest trout.
My long time fishing partner, Russ, shared my obsession. His fishing paraphernalia probably exceeds mine. Amazingly, he even has fishing rods displayed on the wall in his bedroom without a complaint from his spouse.
Somewhere in the last couple of years, fly fishing has lost a bit of its magic for us. Although we haven’t discussed why, I suspect it was simply that there wasn’t much left to learn. We had pretty much reached the bottom of our deep dive with no greater depths to explore. (Fish: it’s now safe to come out of hiding.)
Fly fishing was the type of obsession neuroscientists say can be very healthy for our brains. To keep our faculties from diminishing, we should be immersing ourselves into something new every few years.
Russ has moved on to a new obsession. He’s taken up woodcarving in a big way. He’s quickly amassing large varieties of gouges and chisels, learning the subtleties of sharpening, reading voraciously, and learning new eye-hand coordination skills. He’s creating lovely works out of wood. If the neuroscientists are correct, he’s also creating new neural connections that are keeping his brain as sharp as his chisels. His new hobby is also keeping his mind flexible, making it easier for Russ to move on to learning other things in the future.
Because of a growing body of medical research indicating that you should never stop learning, I’m looking for my next big thing. It’s not as easy to find as I had hoped. For one, it needs to be something I’ll be passionate about. Secondly, it has to be hard enough to keep my interest but not too hard that I’m unable to make any headway. Lastly, I’d love it to require a new skill requiring physical coordination.
For now, I’ll just keep getting rid of the fly fishing gear. I may need the space for my next big thing.
Topics: Aging, Brain, Brain plasticity, Neuroplasticity |
