The things we do for love
When I took up running several years ago, nobody was more surprised than I was that I actually stuck with it. I have never been an athletic person. When I was a student, my height often led people to ask if I played basketball; but I was not especially strong or quick and I certainly wasn’t graceful. Team sports never seemed worth the effort; and while I enjoyed activities like swimming, feeling that I was being pressured to do better or be faster always seemed to sap the endeavor of any enjoyment.
But as an adult I took up running. I’m still not sure why; at first, it was probably just the need to see if I could do it. I started running laps around the park near my home and due to sheer stubbornness, I kept at it through the grueling initial days of side stitches, shortness of breath and sweat in my eyes. By the time running got a little more comfortable, something surprising had happened to my brain- I was actually beginning to enjoy it. Something about watching myself improve, little by little, was deeply gratifying. I was still slow, though.
A few months after I started running I told a friend, “I never could have imagined enjoying something I’m so bad at!” I wasn’t familiar, at the time, with G.K. Chesterton’s assertion that “anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” but I felt great recognition when I came across the quote later. I’m an oldest child, a stereotypically conscientious, perfectionist type of person; and I had always felt the need to do things well, or not at all. But here I was, faithfully running my laps, improving by the week- and by no stretch of the imagination could it be said that I was running especially well. My children could still outrun me. Easily.
But running was bringing me joy: getting me outside, giving me a chance to explore nearby parks and neighborhoods, providing blessedly silent and peaceful alone time to let my mind wander. But one of the best things about my new hobby was the sense of play that it brought into my life, especially during a chaotic time of raising children. I could jump over puddles after a rainy day and not worry about looking silly; I could notice things like a cool breeze on my face or the warm sun on my skin, in a way I hadn’t taken time to do in years. I could make a game out of counting my steps, or trying to run a certain distance a little faster than I had in the past. There was a gratuitous sense of fun, especially because no one else cared if I went for a run. I didn’t have to impress anybody.
Over four years later, running has become an important part of my life. I’m still not an especially good runner; but I have become someone who loves to run anyway. The word Amateur, of course, comes from the Latin word for love: an amateur is not just someone who is inexperienced or unpaid, but someone doing a thing for the love of it. The world today seems almost designed to deliberately thwart amateur pursuits. There is a way to monetize almost any hobby or skill you can think of, and the “side hustle” is an ever present phenomenon. It’s not an entirely bad thing- we have to make money somehow, and if we can do it while engaging in activities we enjoy, so much the better- but still, I think we miss out on something important when we don’t have things in our lives that we do just for love.
Not all activities qualify. Mindless consumption is out. So, too, are activities we find relaxing but which require no real skill or growth. If we never need to stick with a hobby when it is difficult or frustrating, how can we know that love is involved? Love ought to inconvenience us every once in a while.
This concept of love is fundamentally at odds with the idea of self-care so ubiquitous in our culture, which is often invoked to get ourselves out of things we don’t feel like doing, or to justify self-indulgent behavior. To act in self-love- in the sense of love for the image of God that we bear, an awareness that we are beloved of our Creator- is altogether different. It is the force that enables us to pray before going to bed, even when we’re tired; or to eat healthy food when we don’t have anyone making us do it; or to work hard at our pursuits even when they will never make us famous or earn us money. It enables us to look at the things we love doing and see the passions in our hearts as gifts from God. Like the rest of us, they don’t need to serve a utilitarian end in order to be valuable.
Amateur pursuits enable us to recapture the sense of play that most of us lose once we grow out of childhood. Children absorb themselves in utterly unproductive activities- watching ants, scribbling, playing with water- and they enjoy it. In adulthood, it’s hard to let go of the sense that we should be doing something else. We struggle to free ourselves from a mental framework in which all our activities need to hang together coherently, directing us towards an overarching goal. Even leisure becomes a thing to manage and control.
I have come to believe that everyone needs a truly amateur pursuit in their lives. It doesn’t have to be a physical pursuit like running- it could be producing a podcast that will never top the charts, or decorating cakes for your family that inevitably turn out lopsided. It could be writing poetry that always sounds a little awkward when you read it aloud, or getting up early to go bird watching. Whatever it is, it should be something you feel a pull to do more, and do better; but it should also be something you don’t mind doing badly- something you would enjoy working at even if you never improved further.
How do we make time in our lives for activities built on love? We do it the same way we make time for anything else. Of course there are stages of life when there is truly no time, no energy for anything extraneous; but these are almost always temporary. It’s important, during the times of all consuming caregiving for instance, to keep room in our hearts for pursuits of love- to know what we will do, when time opens again. For most of us it’s not truly a question of time- we can always manage to watch our favorite TV shows, after all- but of not having trained our minds and hearts to look for and appreciate amateur pursuits. Sometimes we even feel a little embarrassed about our passions.
“Are you a writer?” someone asked me once. “Oh, not for money,” was my immediate, unthinking reply; as if that invalidated the whole pursuit- the time spent, the efforts I made to improve, the real joy I received in working on a novel that may never be read by anyone but myself.
I hasten to add that being paid to write is wonderful too. Sometimes our pursuits of love and our paychecks do converge in a gloriously fulfilling balance- I wish it happened more often in our world. But I would argue that even people whose jobs consist almost entirely of work done in love can’t afford to forget about being amateurs. There is a freedom, and a joy, that comes from doing things you don’t have to do well.
"Running • France • Versailles" by Living Fitness UK is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
