Ch. 5 // Hobby Practice

📚 The Practice of Attention Book Club 📚

Hi, friends! Welcome to Be Where You Are. We’re rolling along with our low-key book club to read Cody Cook-Parrott’s new book, The Practice of Attention. Here’s last week’s post on Ch. 4, “Digital Detox,” and here’s the post with the framework for how we’ll do this. If you’re a paid subscriber and you’d like to join us for the accountability threads & meet-ups, just send me an email and I’ll get you on the list! 💥

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Reading The Practice of Attention has been about tiny experiments. Choosing not to turn on a podcast while I’m packing up the bathroom for our move. I’ll just wedge the many different creams we’ve stockpiled into the bin and think (the horror!) Choosing to “hang up” my phone even though there are endless texts and end-of-school-year whatsapp notifications barreling in.

Little successes that feel good, a bit more spaciousness opening up in my brain, then losing the thread. Trying again.

This week’s chapter is “Hobby Practice.” For me, hobbies are connected to my efforts to draw boundaries around my work, something that keeps coming up as a struggle for me. While I washed dishes the other day, I turned on The Mother of It All podcast and listened to Kathryn Jezer-Morton, Miranda Rake, and Sarah Wheeler discuss Jezer-Morton’s Cut article, “In 2026, We’re Friction-Maxxing.” They talked about the “slurrification of time” we experience from being on our phones and the internet for so much of the day, and I nodded my head and had to dry my hands to jot down a note when Miranda argued that texts and notifications are far more incessant and distracting for her than social media (YES SAME). They also argued that we have to intentionally carve out time for activities that are not in our phones. Otherwise, we could live whole parts of our days, and thus whole parts of our lives, just swinging from link to link to link. Enter hobbies, which are a way to carve out time off your phone and which bring in new ways of being in the world.

I do not really have hobbies unless you count ruminating about awkward social interactions and looking at the sky—I wish (my daughter just yelled out for another snack—I brought her some trail mix)—I wish I had hobbies. I wish I could tell you that I’m learning to knit and making a tiny hat for our friends’ kid, or planting things in our backyard, getting my hands into the dirt. I’m a recovering workaholic who left a high school teaching job two years ago and shifted into adjunct gigs + writing and now I have more autonomy over my schedule, but also I feel a different kind of pressure to be working and responding to email than I did before. I imagined I would be playing piano every day and going for long walks and just hanging out and enjoying being alive.

I do a lot of noticing trees but then forget their names

Ok, I guess reading and walking could be considered as my hobbies, but even these simple activities that can take very little time often get squeezed out by work and the kids’ needs and schedules and my exhaustion.

Cody argues, “adding in a hobby, even a small one with limited time, can actually expand your time in other places.” In talking about this book with friends, I keep coming up against the privilege inherent in the consideration of adding hobbies into one’s life. I had dinner with a friend last week who cannot squeeze in a workout right now with her work and parenting schedule. She can’t. She’s trying to figure out what pieces she can move around, but it would mean working out at 10 pm? I’ve been there. So, I want to acknowledge that sometimes the circumstances just do not allow it. Maybe that’s where you are with this. Or maybe you’ve carved out time to start painting or doing Tai Chi or going for long hikes.

We moved out of our house two days ago (🫠🫠) and will be traveling until August, when we move back into our home in Pittsburgh. I realize I don’t have the time, space, or materials to be ambitious about hobbies this summer. So, I set a small goal for now, which will look very different from normal life: to read for at least ten minutes, and go for a short walk every day. If I can go longer, great. I’m hoping I can do this no matter where I am or how amorphous my day is. Once I’m back in Pittsburgh, I’d love to try an actual new hobby. A few ideas: some kind of visual art (collage?), gardening, piano, hiking, or knitting.