I’m sitting down to write today, not knowing where it will take me. I don’t have a specific topic in mind. I just know that my keyboard is calling me. Perhaps the most obvious thing on my mind is my newest hobby: pasta making. It has brought me wonders of joy and I am sitting in pure appreciation of how much pleasure making things from scratch can bring to one’s life.
Along with the waves of summer approaching, I feel that I’m in a new season. Lately, my days have been filled with dance, embroidery, and hand-rolling little pasta shells one by one with a glass of wine on the side. My walks to the fruit market have been slower. Browsing through the newly arrived selection has been done with more intention. I’ve been searching for quality in everything I do and consume. If I can’t find the raw, authentic quality I am looking for, I make it.
As I am writing this, it brings me to a certain realization that I had earlier this week. You see, I had started an 80’s Aerobics challenge, just for the fun of it. Oddly, within a couple of days, my interests were beginning to lean towards 80’s pop culture. I had the urge to play 80’s music and dip my toes into movie classics like Grease.
Before I started this challenge, I never had a strong interest in the 80’s and never felt compelled to bring elements from it into my life. In fact, I had never been super keen on 80’s music until I suddenly started enjoying it after only a few days of Jane Fonda workout videos.
What was happening to me? I pondered this for a few minutes. It stunned and surprised me how quickly my interests and even my tastes were influenced by a minor inclusion into my day. This realization caused me to wonder if my interests were my own or simply a result of my environment.
It was only then that it occurred to me how much our daily habits, or what we choose to incorporate in our lives affect everything else. Perhaps this was why our interests change over time, they shift with what we surround ourselves with.
It made me realize how important it was to pay attention to what we bring into our lives as it may influence us in ways we don’t realize. When I journaled about this, I referred to it as a “ripple effect” and wondered if it was a real-life example of the butterfly effect. Essentially, small choices can have big consequences in our lives and touch areas we may be quite unconscious of.
Until this moment, I hadn’t noticed the correlation between making pasta and intentional fruit shopping. This is the power of writing, my friends. Writing down the differences in my day-to-day life allowed me to see the connection, the similarities. Pasta making is a very intentional activity, one that requires you to slow down and appreciate the moment you are living in. Every pasta shell, every strand, is made with love and care as you watch the raw ingredients come together into a quality dish you fully appreciate.
What I’ve noticed is that this same feeling of slowing down and appreciating quality, of doing things with care seems to have translated directly into how I shop for ingredients. Tomatoes are no longer just tomatoes. They are the building blocks of a high-grade dish. Making pasta from scratch has allowed me to see the value of things in their purest form, before they are combined to make something else.
This new hobby of mine has already made a profound impact on my day-to-day and has influenced how I do routine errands. The point I want to make is that we should take into account what we fill our days with and try to see how they influence other parts of our lives.
Perhaps we can become more like the people we want to be simply by incorporating little things that person would do. By incorporating these small things, a ripple effect may very well take place and slowly morph you into the type of person you aim to be without you even realizing it.
I want to encourage you to try this idea out for yourself and see how a new hobby can lead to personal growth. Think about the person you aim to be. It could be someone who is more active, someone who speaks more eloquently, or someone with more patience. How might that person live their day-to-day life? What would they surround themselves with? What might that person be interested in? Consider these questions and use them to make small changes that might ultimately offer impressive results.
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