By Walter Steinwald. (Originally written Jan, 2019.) I wrote this because I was curious to know about hobbies in general, but failed to find anything helpful in defining the term or discussing the affects. I marvel at my kids pretty often and in one of these reveries I saw their avid hobby practice. They each own multiple hobbies and practice them to ever increasing depths. As they mature, the tools and materials needed in practicing these hobbies increase in complexity and rarity. This got me thinking of the state of hobbies and the nature of hobbies overall. Loose parts are difficult, comprehensive boxed single use goodies are on the rise and hobby sections in major stores are reduced or removed altogether. Most of our hobby materials must be got from online. Seeing the benefits my two receive from hobbies, I wanted to just map out what a hobby is before speculating on the demise or not. Some of the edges I found while running my mind over it were pretty enriching and a little startling. A Definition of Hobby What are hobbies? Are hobbies good for kids? What about electronic media as a hobby? These were some of the loose questions I had and here are some of the loose answers I found. Firstly, I need to separate hobby from leisure and play. The end aim of play is fun, just fun. When play is not fun, we stop. Leisure is not fun necessarily, but is similar to play inasmuch as it has no specific aim or preparation. Play is a rope swing, pickup ball game or wrestling on the living room floor. Leisure is a front porch book reading, a cocktail party or fishing along a stream. Hobbies are unlike either play or leisure in the following number of ways.
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By Walter Steinwald. (Originally written June 26, 2015.) There are too many options for most of our life’s needs. Anytime we go to the store or Amazon we are forced to look at reviews, compare prices, options, styles and on and on. There are alternatives to pretty much any product on the market until suddenly we come to our children’s playgrounds. Any park our family has stopped at from New Mexico to New Hampshire is basically the same: swings, a slide, and some sort of platform. In city parks, National parks, private lands these play areas have withstood the free market force of research driven change or even novelty. Of all the products that could improve with research I think kids’ play areas ranks fairly high. But instead their form has been concretized. What are the expectations for our kids regarding these play areas? What is the functional vision for these areas? It seems they could come with a plan or instructional booklet, because many are uni-directional, (“Don’t climb up the slide”, How many times have we heard that?) which amounts to running in circles with obstacles. Is this what we take them to the park for? And they have much fun doing this, but kids are amazing. Children trapped in war torn countries play soccer with tin cans and bare feet and have a great time doing it, but there is so much more that could be done. My kids won’t even attempt that game. Playgrounds hold the potential to see children through a great deal and fill some of what childhood asks, the more obvious being: novel things, physical and mental challenges, and freedom tinctured with safety. Curiosity at times appears to be the motor for the child, driving them on and on, and giving them answers only spawns more questions. What does our basic play area do for this force? Well, unless they’re interested in tensile strength of rubber-coated steel, there’s not much to feed them here. As far as freedom and challenges…. With nowhere to hide from sight or anything manipulative, I don’t know what kind of freedom these structures offer. As far as a challenge of some sorts, they offer stairs, which sometimes a toddler finds daunting, but other than those there is really nothing to cause alarm. How safe can we make a play place? Well it does seem we have hit the limit some ways back. We wonder why so many children lack a healthy self-esteem after we have taken away challenges and replaced them with safety. I don’t think we have the ability to believe in ourselves if we are never tested - at least it is more difficult. {Click below to continue reading.}
By Walter Steinwald. (Originally written June 9, 2015.) Guiding your child through life requires winding through or around some certain conversations from certain influences. Within the small circuit of friendly discussions, I find at times some conversations are not “my” child appropriate. Not to mean the topics are XXX neon sign or blood drenched murder implement level only for my child’s maturity, comprehension level or social understanding they are not constructive. When this comes about I struggle to remove my child or reroute the conversation. This is a basic parental action, I think. And it’s a description of a single conversation at a particular time with a single person. Enter cable. Guiding, winding, ignoring influences that do not build your child is by and large futile. Now we have three to five commercials separating our random programs into fifteen to twenty sections. This builds quite a crowd of indiscriminate people having indiscriminate conversations in your living room, a crowd that awaits parental approval to stay or go. Why do we invite so many strangers into our lives? Often, we say that it is only way to stay informed about our culture and the global goings on. Also, so many cable shows are educational and the whole family sitting around learning can’t be all bad. Lastly, we love to be entertained. The whole cable industry is built on these pilings, raising it up to a near mythical need. It seems at times that the daily news is scripted into four categories: global natural catastrophe, global political catastrophe, world leaders or celebrities acting immoral and the bizarre. Day to day offers slight changes for each category, so that a weekly glance is sufficient to stay abreast. But if we are such a person that carries responsibilities so that we are forced to know moment-to-moment news, is it worth watching all the commercials in between? For most of us, not under global responsibilities, who don’t have any ability to practically change the situation, this constant memorial of our ineptitude will probably lead to depression. Seeing constant carnage with no ability to help can’t lead to shiny happy people. Ought we to pace ourselves in this sphere? {Click below to continue reading.}
By Walter Steinwald. Originally written August 6, 2015. In our home, in education or living, we’ve always struggled to allow concentration to have its way. When the kids have shut out, through play, all thoughts toward anything else, the schedule is often realigned. I know it takes work to concentrate, task or leisure centered, so when I see them focused on a thing; a game, figurine play, sewing etc. it is difficult for me to find something more important for them to do. It seems to me that facilitating their habits or abilities to concentrate is giving them a certain greater gift than that small piece of information that was planned in our school schedule. Practicing prolonged concentration in a busy world always reminds me of Jack London’s To Light A Fire; it is a necessary thing to be done in the midst of great opposition. When we concentrate, all or very much of, our intellectual tenants are pointed at one single thing, magnifying the subtleties and finding the ironies. This requires us, in some degree, to bracket or push aside all things not necessary to the point. (I have always marveled at readers in busy public places.) Taken together these actions allow us to grasp the thing for a prolonged time, filling ourselves with the object and nothing else. Whatever the object, this is how we make it a part of ourselves. This is how we build our intellectual homes. One could hardly find the mysteries in our world without applying these mental pressures unless we strain intuition to breaking point. All reality to some extent requires us to set upon it with these mental claws. The greatest of searches, that one for ourselves, requires much energy and relies on a deep penetration done with focus. In fact, if we don’t want to slog through life with knee-jerk responses, we admit that honor, love, forgiveness—most any saintly act—and even emotions require concentration for a proper response. For one not to simply grow older, but in order to mature as well, the ability to concentrate must also develop in relation. {Click below to continue reading.}
By Walter Steinwald. Originally written January 27, 2015. From its very birth, we have been using the door to form for ourselves a new womb, a place to stay safe warm in body. It has been a medium to grasp the shadowy world beyond, through story and analogy. It gives a child safety when fleeing to their room and hiding under the covers with it closed. It seems, for us all, to incarnate a provisional constancy of sorts. But, lately in our world, perhaps the door has become a wall, not this temporary barrier closed in time of storm to be reopened when calm has returned. Rather, it seems the door has become a barrier to everything and anything all the time, a place we hide our vulnerabilities from one another, soothing ourselves from the lurking dangers out there. There is talk of children not going outside, not playing in the streets, local parks are lonely, bicycle sales are down, but with this great thing dividing the “out there” from the “inside,” isn’t there an irony that adults can take control of? There usually is a good reason for inventions, some need fulfilled or a task lightened, but then come the dragons of misuse and overuse. Interior climate controls and a well insulated home are wonderful inventions; easing our life and even simplifying it, so we can concentrate on the more ethereal ways. Is there reason, though, to hermetically seal a home on a breezy summer evening, with the lilac and the rustling of leaves floating about? Is there good reason to keep the face of our home tight in early spring when the whole earth outside is waking up and knocking at its winter shell? Though we know with every strain of lilac there comes a gust of diesel fumes and the singing leaves are overwhelmed, nearly, with the engines climbing and falling, breaking and rising again. The natural along with the un-natural forces certainly justify, not only, a door but a rather thick and powerful one. And so we must be impractical at times. We remember the pansy that has made its way up through the crack in the sidewalk, forcing us to step over it and admire it, with the same voice the light tinge of bird song or faint taste of grass hovering on the wings of fumes and smoke can convince us that “out there” is worth having, not only seeing, and enduring some little sacrifice in obtaining. {Click below to continue reading.}
By Molly Steinwald. January 14, 2019. Saturday was filled with building, and building! I've been the Executive Director (and Walter and kiddos, volunteers) of the Environmental Learning Center for four years now; and we were excited to move the Center's annual benefit to its 64-acre nature campus for the first time in a decade. While I prepped that morning for the evening's logistics and commentary, Walter and kiddos built - in our driveway - a beautiful outdoor projection screen of wood and canvas. The screen was key to the evening's fundraising; and Center staff and community members will be able to use it for many, multi-purposed events outdoors into the future. {Click below to continue reading.}
By Walter Steinwald. Originally written September 17, 2015. The kids love taking the dogs for their walk…on Tuesday. On all other days of the week it is a necessary tedium, a chore, but on that one day, like a grand opening sale, people line the streets with offerings of all sorts. Trash Day, as far as gifts are concerned, vies with Christmas and Birthdays and surpasses Halloween and all the others that fall in between. Partially this status grows from the weekly repetitions and in part from the mystery of the gifts and the knowledge obtained about our neighbors. Granting reprieves through continuing use or distribution into new memories are the ways the kids see trash. For them rejuvenating and continuing the narrative is much more tangible than buying things (new) that often have little ability to create one. Sometimes they are amazed that, “Someone would throw this away.” Often they are saddened by their own inability to use so much that is usable. I think if they could drive we would have a great deal more “stuff” in our yard and house. Often what they do literally drag home are; plants (that they saved), cloth, books, any sort of wheel and etc. It is a way that the kids get to know there closeted neighbors in at least a mild form, to see what they don’t want or what they have used gives quite a lot of information. From the very old to the new, things that were stored for a near generation or the things that were bought yesterday tell the kids stories of the owners and the neighborhood. From the houses that curb things in much better condition than any Goodwill sells to the indescribable rust heaps all give tone and understanding to us lookers on. The things on the latter end are what get a new home. Neither one of the kids really appreciates the new, but instead find value in the aged, very used things. For an example, a seed spreader from about 1950 that doesn’t turn or a tea service with broken handles and handmade contraptions that don’t seem to have an obvious use are all in our home. This irony of taking old worn opposed to new shiny things is something I have thought about with some pleasure because I think what they were after is not so much stuff but memories. When they use pieces (pieces because that’s usually what becomes of them) of these things now they remember the house and sometimes even the time of year and the owner. These are precious things and the older and more used they are, the more precious. {Click below to continue reading.}
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June 2019
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