This is the script of this morning’s Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. James May is the guest editor and one of his chosen themes was hobbies.
I love going into primary schools and taking the questions of young children. It doesn’t matter what the theme is, but the seemingly random and often very funny interrogation follows. “What do you do for fun?” I was asked recently. As if the day job must simply be a laborious burden. “Do you have any hobbies?” is normally the supplementary.
And this is where, for me at least, the problems start.
Is a hobby some sort of a sideline from real life? Is it, as the dictionary definitions seem to suggest, something you do that brings pleasure and is not work? Of course, this provokes a challenge for someone like me who has a vocation. It reminds me of that famous David Beckham quote. He apparently said during his playing days: “I don’t have time for hobbies. At the end of the day, I treat my job as a hobby. It’s something I love doing.” I know what he means.
I think this opens up two trains of thought for me. First, can my life be separated out into bits that somehow join together, or am I a whole person who is more than the sum of the parts? In the same way that the biblical writers insist on a human being holding together a unity of body, mind and spirit, so we cannot easily divide a life up into isolated parts. According to this way of thinking, a hobby is not a distraction from ‘real’ life, but, rather, as vital an element to a single life as work or anything else.
My second thought might sound a bit odd, so I’ll explain the background. I once knew a very elderly man who seemed to be interested in everything. His name was Ralph and his curiosity ranged from the origins of the universe right through to the origins of law firms in Leicestershire. Whatever subject we talked about, Ralph had something to say or ask. I once suggested he was a reflection of God – insofar as both he and God seemed to be (what he laughingly called) ‘over-hobbied’. What do I mean by this?
Well, take a quick look at the creation stories in Genesis. God doesn’t just zap the universe into being with a click of his jobbing fingers. For example, he gives responsibility to human beings to name theanimals in text that exudes playfulness. You’ve just got the giraffe sorted when along comes a centipede or a mongoose. This work of creation suggests fun and not fear, imagination rather than received diktat, creativity instead of boredom.
Anyway, back to David Beckham who in his retirement has taken up beekeeping and approaches it with the same discipline and rigour he once applied to football. He gets my philosopher of the day award and is more theologically adept than he probably imagined.
