A New Routine to Ease Your Handcrafting onto the Page Or, How Senior Citizens Can Write About their Favorite Hobbies
PAGE WORKMEMOIR
A certain restlessness lives in our hands
I fold my laundry neatly, sorting it by type and color before I hang it, pressed, in my closet. On my desk, notebooks, calendars, and journals are kept in drawers, arranged carefully according to size. Paper clips, bookmarks, and pens sit in small wooden boxes. Even my bags become storage, holding both mundane and important papers in their proper place.
In my senior year, my obsessive-compulsive fixing has grown more permissive. Left unchecked, this energy begins to disrupt my writing routine, and I often find myself drawn into projects other than content creation. Yet this detour feels serendipitous, turning me toward a new hobby. A certain restlessness that lives in my hands now leans into drawing. I'm wondering whether I should focus on colored pencil, watercolor, or pastels, what medium I might slowly grow into. At last, the art materials I have stored in my bag for years will find their routine, as my days have become less structured
WRITE: What is the first thing your hands naturally reach for when you sit down to do your hobby? What does that gesture reveal about you?
What Drawing Brings to Memory Other than the Skill Itself
Through my decades of work, I have learned that every process is a pattern, and once habituated, it defines the self in time. Each production, even from paid labor, evokes a feeling of having achieved or failed a goal, and whether desires are met within the tasks. Retirement erases this. And now it's time to create new habits for identity formation, that is, while purposeless art making with joy.
What will drawing teach me other than a way of producing images? Since I give myself no deadline nor function for the hobby, the urgency is merely in filling a white page with little hesitation, this is not a career path nor a competition, after all, but a battle against tedium.
My most likely subject is my immediate surroundings. The first canvas I made, a painting of a chair and a picture frame, records a quiet corner in my mother’s house. Within that frame is her photograph, her gentle presence still and upright in a space she shaped through small, repeated acts of keeping things in order. That batibot carries traces of her daily tending, her steadfast homemaking. This canvas brings me back to the memory of how she endured life’s steady blows.
WRITE: Just by looking around you, what is the most likely subject intricately woven into your crafting or hobby?
Why It is Difficult to Learn Drawing from a How To Draw Book
I have a shelf full of How to Draw books, from how to draw figures to how to draw landscapes, and how to do caricatures of animals and faces of people, and how to use pastels, when oil is best, and what watercolor papers to use for practice, and all—every book in full color, coffee-table size. I admit I have not read a single one of them, though they sit comfortably on my shelf. Why I kept buying these art books and storing art materials testifies to my frustrated artist self.
Now flipping through the pages of those books, I realize it is difficult for this senior to learn from a How-To manual, because I am tired of processes. Instead, what I am aiming for in drawing is rhythm more than skill. Like acting in a stage play (I had a little theater background in college), I want to first understand how little or how much I can move within the space, not necessarily how to act. So the art manuals are useful only as far as they allow me to see what is possible. Knowledge is not always instruction, and knowing is not through technique. I know that to draw, I must learn how to stare and stay long inside a moment before I can even begin to limit its dimensions.
WRITE: If you were not explaining how to do your craft, what would you say it has taught you about life itself?
Drawing in My Second life
Drawing continues my instinct for documentation as it also preserves memory, voice, and feeling. This too is legacy-making, in turning ordinary things into evidence that my life was attentive and awake to its surroundings.
Like writing, drawing asks for dedication and diligence in looking more closely at things and reconsidering the forms and shapes of subjects. Yet drawing will remain a hobby for me. What matters more is what I will discover through drawing than what I can fully master.
While writing has been my vocation, drawing comes without the demands of labor. I will do it in play, in fun, as my way of affirming that in my senior years, I can remain a witness while at play.
