How to Find a Hobby?

We're happiest when our world includes both productive work and enjoyable play. Luckily, we live in a time when intriguing and exciting hobbies abound.

Collect Something

• Ramble through flea markets and find antiques.
• Trade baseball cards or comic books.
• Gather a family of dolls.
• Buy, sell and trade die-cast collectibles.
• Seek out Beanie Babies and teddy bears.
• Accumulate rare coins and stamps.
• Search for arrowheads and other historical memorabilia.
• Indulge in kitsch - matchbooks, ashtrays, beer bottles, snow globes.
• Go for Americana originals - Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Howdy Doody, Roy Rogers, Star Wars, Star Trek or Precious Moments collectibles.
• Acquire antique toys - lead soldiers, rag dolls, old bicycles and wagons.
• Find and refurbish old record players and Victrolas, along with 45 rpm and 78 rpm recordings.

Do or Make Something

• Go for an adrenaline rush - scuba dive, sky dive, rock climb.
• Stay healthy - play tennis or golf; join a basketball, softball or volleyball league; bicycle or roller blade.
• Seek out the wilderness - hike and camp, hunt or fish, pan for gold.
• Build a perfect garden.
• Take a course at a local college or university.
• Raise, train, and show cats, dogs or horses.
• Create a wild world in an aviary or aquarium.
• Treasure hunt with a metal detector.
• Study for an amateur radio license.
• Dance - swing, jive, two-step, mambo, line or square dance.
• Volunteer - as a youth group leader, in your church or synagogue, to help charities, to participate in community projects with Habitat for Humanity.
• Travel and tour, by car, RV, or motorcycle.
• Create art - take photographs, learn to paint, draw, sculpt.
• Get a buzz from beekeeping.
• Join a local acting troupe.
• Craft ceramic or rag dolls.
• Make dollhouses.
• Build a village around a model train layout.
• Construct furniture and do woodworking.
• Learn to make stained glass windows and figures.
• Learn to make candles.
• Turn mud into practical and beautiful pottery.
• Indulge nostalgia and imagination by making models of cars, ships or airplanes.
• Learn to brew beer or make wine.
• Take up gourmet cooking.
• Paint - watercolors, oil, acrylics.
• Quilt, needlepoint, crochet or knit.
• Grow prize-winning roses.
• Restore a classic car or build a hot rod.
• Cut and polish semiprecious gemstones.

Watch Something

• Indulge yourself with tickets for big-time stick and ball sports.
• Follow less-recognized sporting events, attending and supporting local schools and colleges.
• Take in exciting car and boat racing, both at local tracks and national events.
• Follow horse and dog racing.
• Become a film buff.
• Get in touch with the natural world by bird-watching or beachcombing.
• Feed your spirit by attending musical and cultural events. Adopted from eHow.com

Vitamins For The Mind! Change Your Story, Improve Your Life

What do you tell yourself and others about your life? Do you paint a picture of your life as happy and optimistic or as somber and sad?

It’s not what happens to us in this life but it is what we do with and about what happens to us in this life. Life is not fair. Never has been. Never will be. That’s just the way it is. So if you don’t like the hand that you’ve been dealt you have a right to complain all you want but that won’t change circumstances and it won’t make it better. It will make it worse.

Our lives are defined by the stories we tell ourselves and others. Good things happen to everybody and bad things happen to everybody. But it’s the story we tell that emphasizes the event.

We’ve all heard inspiring stories about people who have overcame hardships and difficulties. Those are the stories everyone likes to hear. They remind us of the triumph of the human spirit. On the other hand we all hear stories of gloom and doom from often well-meaning friends, loved ones, relatives. We hear exaggerated stories of sickness and despair. But all of the exaggeration of the bad brings more bad to your life. You get what you focus on. You see what you look for. If you are focusing on “how bad it is” that is what you are getting, more of “how bad it is”. If you are focused on the good that is what you get more of “the good”.

You can choose the stories you tell in your own life. You can choose to downplay the bad things and focus on the good things.

You can choose to put your emotions into the happy and joyful things and minimize your emotional words and stories about the bad things. We all have things we don’t like and things that happen to us that we would rather not have in our lives, but our lives go on. And our stories go on. The definition of what happened to you lies in the story you tell about it. When you change your story, you change your life because you changed the meaning and the definition of what happened.

Viktor Frankl, the holocaust survivor and the author of the great book “Man’s Search for Meaning” said

“Everything can be taken from a man or a woman but one thing: the last of human freedoms to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Mr. Frankl survived one of most horrific events of all times. He could have told a horrendous story but he chose not to. Somehow he found meaning in it and he chose for his story to be a triumph of the human spirit.

May he inspire us all. What do you tell yourself and others about your life? Do you paint a picture of your life as happy and optimistic or as somber and sad? It’s not what happens to us in this life but it is what we do with and about what happens to us in this life. Life is not fair. Never has been. Never will be. That’s just the way it is. So if you don’t like the hand that you’ve been dealt you have a right to complain all you want but that won’t change circumstances and it won’t make it bet...Adopted from www.positivearticles.com