1/18/2021
By Mista.
Picking Up Hobbies During Quarantine…And My Story.
During quarantine, a lot of people have picked up new hobbies-activities to do just for fun. For some, it acts as a creativity outlet to channel their energy-while for others, it’s more of the appeal of having something to do while stuck at home, rather than just sitting on the couch and watching Netflix(I am guilty as charged.)
Many of my friends from school have picked up the activity of making crafts-this covers an extremely broad range of activities, ranging from embroidering one-color T-shirts to DIY-ing things like pillowcases and tank tops-I even have a friend who made an adorable sock monkey out of some old socks of hers that she doesn’t wear anymore.
All these stories that my friends have shared, brings me to share my own story regarding something I picked up during quarantine. It’s not DIY crafting….not cooking(although I am able to make quite the nice fried rice(thanks mum))….nor dancing(I suffer from the so called “duck feet”-extreme clumsiness when it comes to dancing, I always step on myself!)
During quarantine, I have begun to play the piano again.
Wow! Shockers! The piano!
My road with the general area of musical inclination has been quite the interesting route since I was eight years old. Turn the clock back to 2012, before quarantine. Imagine a little girl with a soup bowl cut, sitting in front of a piano. It’s her first ever lesson. She’s very, very excited-seeing the black and white keys stretched across the majestic piano, she can imagine her own hands dancing across the keys…like Rubenstein, or Lang Lang.
However, she soon realizes that learning a new instrument isn’t always a walk in the park. Yes, it began easy, but as the pieces became more difficult, she began to become annoyed by the difficulty level. Eventually, she began to resent practicing the piano-she didn’t want to sit down and practice while all her friends were outside, playing in the park or hanging out with each other at fast food places.
She even missed one of her best friends’ birthday parties due to a piano lesson scheduling conflict.
That little girl is me.
Young me didn’t have the guts to openly defy my mother’s wrath(she was the one that introduced me to the piano in the first place), so I waited until I was sixteen–then, I refused to even touch the piano-I didn’t even want to open the lid of the piano.
However, fate decided to play a little trick.
Quarantine happened, and under the mountains of assignments, burnout, and stress that accumulated during the first weeks of junior year, I desperately needed a new hobby-not only because I needed an outlet for my stress, but also because I wanted to have something to do that nurtured my creativity.
So, I played the piano again.
At first, I could barely play through elementary-level pieces of J.S. Bach, but as I cleared the cobwebs in my “pianist” area of my mind, the musical sensation began to return. The true part that ended up nurturing my creativity was precisely the fact that I could interpret piano pieces in my own way.
And the rest is history.
It’s never too late to go back to old hobbies that you’ve forgotten. I promise!