I am a dilettante; I love many things. To me the world is an infinitely interesting place, a cornucopia of things to do, people to meet, ideas to discover, and places to visit.
Is it any surprise that the first Girl Scout merit badge I earned was called The Dabbler? It was an all-purpose generalist badge for arts and crafts. It required me to do eight out of eleven different tasks such as make a sit upon, create a hand puppet, and carve a design into a potato to make a printing block. Naturally, being an overachiever, I did all eleven.
My curiosity is a common thread that runs through my entire life. I am curious about everything and love to learn new things. Many of my sentences begin with the phrase “I wonder why,” “I wonder if” or the ever popular, “I read somewhere…” My mind is always active, leaping around from one thought to the next like a kid jumping from stone to stone in a creek.
My husband tells me I think too much, and he may be right. I do tend to overanalyze, suffer from decision paralysis, and ruminate like a cow chewing its cud. These habits of mind have a way of turning me into a depressed and anxious person at times—a worrywart at best and a victim of clinical depression at worst. Still, I enjoy thinking and have learned over the years how to meditate, which calms my racing mind and helps me stay present.
Naturally I have always been a great reader and lover of books. As a child, I could often be found sitting with a book on my lap, a stack of unread books from the library close at hand. I would disappear for hours into the fictional worlds my favorite authors and I created together in my head.
Once when I was in second grade, I was walking to school while simultaneously reading a book. I was so engrossed in the story that at one point I looked up and had no idea where I was. I didn’t recognize the street I was on or any of the houses. Fortunately, a mailman put me back on course.
As an adult, I coined the phrase “aliberphobia”—fear of being without a book. I am most afraid of running out of reading matter on a plane. It’s happened before, and it’s not pretty. At times I have resorted to reading the information in the back of the in-flight magazine….in French. That to me is a desperate situation.
My curiosity makes me a great listener because I love to find out about people and hear their stories. I feel I would make a great talk show host because I can strike up and sustain a conversation with just about anyone. And being a dilettante, I know a little about a lot of things, which makes it easy to find common ground with other people.
Being a dilettante doesn’t necessarily mean I never master the things I devote myself to. I think of myself as an amateur in the original meaning of the word: a lover. I love many things and I love mastering them. For example, I took piano lessons from age 7 through college and even performed a recital my senior year in high school. But I am an amateur, not a professional musician, and I know the difference.
My many interests leave me susceptible to enthusiasms and obsessions that can last months, even years. For example, in the 1980s, I lived in Boston and became a Boston Celtics fan. I went from mispronouncing the team name as “the Keltics” to posting a huge color photo of Larry Bird from the Boston Globe on my office bulletin board.
One Christmas my husband gave me a book about a Western woman who sneaked into Tibet in the early 20th century and traveled in disguise. After I read that, I then read every book about Tibet I could find. At another point, I read all 17 Patrick O’Brian novels about the British Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. I also bought the companion cookbook and mastered a mean Spotted Dick, a traditional suet pudding studded with raisins. For a short while, I was an expert on sailing a four-masted ship, battle tactics, and the punishment for crimes such as buggery—which, typically in the British Royal Navy, was death.
That obsession led me to an exploration of books about Arctic and Antarctic explorers such as Amundsen, Scott and my hero Sir Ernest Shackleton. If you met me at a party during that period, I would have bored you to tears with the tale of Shacklteon and his ship the Endurance, crushed in the ice. He and his men survived by sailing three small boats to Elephant Island, and then five men, including Shackleton, sailed one of them, the 17-foot James Caird, in an epic 800- mile open boat journey to South Georgia Island. There they crossed a mountain range that had never been scaled before to reach a whaling station, and from there staged a rescue of their comrades back on Elephant Island.
But I digress. As you can see, when I find a new passion, I dive in and go deep and really get wet. For example, I fell in love with Nia, a dance-based exercise I first tried at Rancho la Puerta. That encounter led me to do the White Belt training and to travel on three Nia retreats, one in Costa Rica and two in India.
My love of nature, the outdoors, and hiking led me to volunteer with an East Bay land conservation nonprofit called Save Mount Diablo for more than a decade. I’m still actively involved in saving our beloved local mountain from development and preserving wilderness close to home.
Now that I am retired, I am at liberty to indulge my many interests and acquire new ones. A few years ago, I took an intro class in mosaics. Now my new passion is making mosaics, taking classes at the Institute of Mosaic Art, and learning about substrates, adhesives, and tesserae. Another passion I first discovered at Rancho La Puerta is African drumming. So now I own a beautiful djembe drum and take classes on Tuesday nights.
Sometimes I get frustrated when people try to put me in a box. Just because I love to hike and camp doesn’t mean I don’t like shopping at Nordstrom or going to the opera. Just because I listen to NPR doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy Game of Thrones. And just because I read the Wall Street Journal doesn’t mean I’m a capitalist pig. Maybe this all makes me a bit of a chameleon, constantly changing my colors, but I don’t see anything wrong with that. To me, it’s all part of exploring and learning and seeing the world through different lenses. I wear my dilettante badge with pride.
