Most of us have a strange relationship with time.
We spend Monday waiting for Friday. We spend winter waiting for summer. We spend the workday waiting to go home and the evening dreading the next morning. We count down to vacations, holidays, retirement, the next purchase, the next change, the next point in our lives when things will finally feel different.
Without realizing it, we can spend an enormous portion of our lives waiting for our lives to begin.
Ask someone how they’re doing and you’ll hear it in the language: “Just getting through the week.” “Making it to Friday.” “Surviving until vacation.” We say these things casually because everyone understands them. They’re normal.
Maybe they shouldn’t be.
Because there is something unsettling about realizing that the thing we’re trying to get through is our own life.
Of course, not every day is going to be extraordinary. People have jobs they don’t love, responsibilities they didn’t choose, bills that still arrive when life is difficult, and seasons where simply getting through the day really is an accomplishment. Life has never promised us constant adventure.
But there is a difference between enduring a difficult season and accidentally building an entire existence around endurance.
Modern life makes that surprisingly easy.
Wake up> Get ready> Commute> Work> Come home> Eat> Scroll> Watch something> Sleep> Repeat.
Eventually Friday arrives, so we reward ourselves by staying up later while staring at a different screen. Saturday disappears astonishingly quickly. Sunday becomes preparation for Monday. Then we do it again.
Weeks become months. Months become years. Somewhere along the way, birthdays begin arriving much faster than they used to.
The frightening part isn’t that time moves quickly. It’s that routine can make enormous amounts of it disappear without leaving many memories behind.
Think back over the last year. Some days are probably vivid. A trip. A project. A conversation. Something you built. Somewhere you went. Something hilarious that happened. The first time you tried something new. A day outside when the weather was perfect.
Now try remembering an ordinary Tuesday from six months ago.
It’s probably gone.
Thousands of hours of our lives vanish like that, not because they didn’t happen, but because nothing happened inside them that gave the mind a reason to hold on.
That’s one reason childhood felt so long.
When you’re young, everything is new. Your first bicycle. Your first fish. Your first time sleeping outside. Your first time building something with your own hands. Your first road trip. Your first glimpse of the ocean. Your first time realizing you can climb higher than your parents would probably approve of.
The world is constantly surprising you, so your mind keeps making memories.
Then adulthood arrives and we become efficient. We learn the route. We develop routines. We stop exploring. We order the same food, visit the same places, spend time with the same people, sit in the same chair and eventually become so good at navigating our lives that we barely have to pay attention while we’re living them.
Efficiency is useful for getting things done.
It may be terrible for experiencing a lifetime.
Perhaps that’s why so many people have the strange feeling that the years are accelerating. Time hasn’t changed. We have simply stopped giving our minds enough landmarks.
A year filled with first attempts, unfinished projects, unexpected trips, new places, mistakes, discoveries and ridiculous stories feels different from a year filled with repetition. Both contain 365 days, but they don’t contain the same amount of life.
This doesn’t require quitting your job and disappearing into the mountains. It might begin with something much smaller.
Build the table you’ve been talking about building… Plant something and see if you can keep it alive… Take your kid fishing even if neither of you knows what you’re doing… Learn to paint… Restore something that probably should have been thrown away… Hike the trail you’ve driven past fifty times… Learn the recipe your grandmother never wrote down… Pick up a camera… Start collecting something wonderfully unnecessary… Make something ugly and then make another one.
Go somewhere simply because you’ve never been there. Do something whose only justification is that you’re curious.
We have become remarkably good at asking whether something is productive, profitable or efficient. Those are useful questions, but they aren’t the only questions worth asking.
Sometimes, “Will I remember this?” is enough.
That’s one of the ideas underneath Hobbies & Homes that matters most to me.
A hobby isn’t merely something to fill spare time. A project isn’t merely something to finish. A trip isn’t merely somewhere to go. These things interrupt the blur. They give ordinary weeks edges and colors. They create stories. They put us beside people we might never have met and teach us things we didn’t know we cared about.
I don’t want Hobbies & Homes to become another place people visit because they’re bored enough to scroll. There are already plenty of places designed for that.
I want it to become a place that makes you close the screen.
Find the idea. Learn what you need. Meet someone who knows more than you. Then go outside, walk into the garage, clear off the workbench, open the tackle box, pick up the brush, gather the family, start the engine, pack the bag or finally begin the thing you’ve been saying you would do someday.
Then come back and show us what happened.
Maybe it worked. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe the shelf leans slightly to the left and the fish got away. Maybe your first painting looks nothing like what you imagined.
Good!
At least something happened.
So here’s the challenge for this week: do one thing you’ll remember.
It doesn’t have to be expensive, impressive or worth posting anywhere else. Start something. Build something. Go somewhere. Learn something. Fix something. Make something. Try the thing you’ve been putting off because you’re busy, because you’re inexperienced, or because someday always seemed like a better time.
Then bring it back here.
Tell us in the Hobbies & Homes community what you decided to do. Share a picture if you have one. Tell us what happened, what went wrong, what surprised you, or what you’re going to try next. If you see somebody attempting something you already know how to do, help them. Answer the question. Encourage the beginner. Share what you learned when you were the one making the mistakes.
That’s how this becomes more than a website.
One person’s curiosity becomes an experience. That experience becomes a story. The story inspires somebody else to try. Someone with twenty years of knowledge helps someone on day one. People stop merely consuming what other people create and start creating lives, skills, projects and memories of their own.
There will always be another workweek. Another bill. Another obligation. Another reason to wait until things settle down. And if we’re not careful, we can spend decades preparing to live in a future that keeps moving one day ahead of us.
Your life isn’t waiting on the other side of Friday.
It’s happening on Tuesday too.
So don’t just read this and move on to the next thing.
Go give yourself something worth remembering. Then come back and tell us about it.
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