That Which Sets Your Soul Ablaze
In one of my recent blogwalking spree, I stumbled upon a set of discussion about the difficulty of picking up a hobby. I wish I had saved the links, but it was one of the hazy bedside scrolling I never intended to mull about, but mull about it I did.
I never really understand the phrase "picking up a hobby", much less "failed hobbies". I consider something my hobby when I have already developed fondness of it and gravitate towards it because I want to, and prior to that anything I try (and I try a whole lot) are simply activities, including the many clubs and courses my mother shuttled me to as a good Asian child. Failed is a very loaded word too, as if you can't try it again later (and maybe develop an affinity then), like it's once and done. I've made games since the era of Flash, but it never clicked for me until I went to high school and tried other engines.
One of the articles lamented that they had never found anything that set their soul on fire, and that was... a hell of an expectation for a hobby. I like many things and revel in being a jack of all trades, but I'll be hard pressed to describe any of them as 'setting my soul on fire'. I have gone through times forgoing some of them owing to Life Circumstances and I still live, though living with them does feel more enriching. My love is at once pervasive and understated. You won't find me shouting from the rooftops, but I'll steal hours quietly in the night, burning midnight oil with the scant scrap of energy I could muster, trawling every scrap of information I could find lurking. I would appear very dry and all-business, until you accidentally trigger an unskippable cutscene.
Without love it cannot be seen, and it is a love not inferior to anything.
But I can somewhat grasp the idea, maybe, though not quite how the writer meant it. Have you ever been awake dead in the night, yearning to make something, anything, and it tortures you so because you can't, there's a deadline looming and you're not supposed to tire yourself out doing all this, and the reckless anxiety of feeling inadequate, that nothing you make could ever hold up to that aspiration in your head.
And you feel like crying.
But you push through, make something anyway, and it really doesn't quite hold up but you're glad you try and maybe next time it wouldn't be quite misshapen, or it would be and you're still doing this anyway. To create is to be mad.
Or you swallow everything and return to sleep smothering the quivering desire, holding a flickering flame to tomorrow. You can try to bury it, you know it will rear its head again, close to bursting.
I started writing because i had to. Words would fill my head and I couldn't think of anything else. I keep a commonplace book so I'd have place to pour them out and percolate, and only then sleep would find me.
And in the age where efficiency seems to be king and everyone is encouraged to relegate their creative pursuits to a set of machines, it feels ever important to make something, to hold something tangible in your hand.
Maybe, just maybe,
I don't have anything to set my soul ablaze,
But it's in there burning anyway,
sometimes an ember waiting to be rekindled
sometimes a mere flicker
and sometimes swaying
alive.