The Whoosh

"Poetry sucks," said Charles Darwin. Or close enough — that's what he meant when he called it, in his own autobiography, insipid, a waste of time, fit only for people with holes in their brains.

He rails against poetry for two or three paragraphs, then makes a bootlegger's 180 — spins the whole argument around without lifting his foot off the gas — and admits there was a stretch of his life when nothing gave him more joy than poetry. "My mind," he wrote, "seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts." Then he mourns it: the part of his brain that once let him enjoy poetry, had atrophied and was gone, and he's honestly not sure he came out ahead.

We've got a new singer in the band I'm in, and her husband said something to me after rehearsal that stuck: "People who've got hobbies are interesting, even when their hobbies are boring." Try explaining to someone what's so great about having a hobby of gardening, quilting, bodybuilding, coin collecting, rocking a nursing home, trap shooting, or playing the bagpipes. If the other person hasn't done it, they'll just stare at you like you're crazy. What they can see, though, is that you're engaged, curious, lit up. That you've got a pilot light burning strong.

I've got friends who do all of those crazy hobbies. I've got a lot more who are Charles Darwin — people whose pilot light got crowded out somewhere along the way and they never noticed it go dark. Ask them their hobby and you get "reading the news," "staying in shape," "hanging out at home." One woman told me, dead serious, that her hobby was dieting. Quieter than bagpipes and trap shooting, for sure. But I wonder if there was a version of Darwin's poetry in there once, too — something they let slip away without much of a fight.

Get busier, have kids, and it's easy to decide you have to be serious now — no more indulging outside interests. Some things need to go on hold. But there's a difference between turning down a pilot light and letting it go dark for good.

Steve was a colleague I admire enormously, who retired early to move to California to spend 365 days a year growing a garden at his home near Monterey.  He once asked me, "I just don't get why you like playing a side instrument (sax) in random bands." I was flummoxed that I couldn't explain it either. I just feel a "whoosh" every time I do it.

Same with my friend who can't tell me why he likes collecting coins. Even though he's perhaps the most cited living psychologist, he can't explain his own thinking about why he likes 100-year-old nickels and dimes so much. What I can see, however, is that he sends emails at 5 AM, is excited about whatever he's working on, and that he's still on fire at 77 the same way he was when I met him 35 years ago.

Somebody once pointed out that "recreation" is really "re-creation" — you find the thing worth clearing space for. It's the thing that re-creates or rebuilds you some way -- even if you can't fully explain it to anyone who doesn't do it.

At the end of the summer I string together video clips of our band's summer shows so we can see what needs fixing — bad harmonies, wrong notes, flubbed intros and solos. What struck me this year was that even in the middle of our million mistakes, everyone looks happy.

I can't explain the whoosh. My friend can't explain silver dollars. Quilters and bagpipers can't explain it either. But it's easy to see.  

​It's also important to protect.  Just like poetry.

The X'Plozionz -- The Rock & Soul Show Band of the Finger Lakes -- at Cool Lea, NY, Summer 2026

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