The institutional affiliation
Benefits of Pursuing a Specific Hobby
I would like to begin by saying that the diversity of people’s abilities and qualities has expanded so much that it is getting hard to stand out from the crowd. Besides, it is difficult to reveal the whole potential of the human’s brain and body. Some of us are interested in gymnastics while others cannot do the split, because of the lack of training or physical inability. However, hobbies make our lives more exciting and pleasant.
The first thing that should be noted is that people became engrossed in a monotonous everyday routine so much that they hardly have time to spend their leisure time with passion. Furthermore, it would be boring to live without being uninspired or devoted to something. Currently, there are a lot of different types of hobbies: from candle making to Parkour, from hunting to LEGO building, from home brewing to Sudoku solving, etc. Nevertheless, there are leisure activities that are more classical and known by anyone, namely, reading and painting. Many people think that reading is an activity which is generally taken for granted. Even though, many bookworms represent themselves as reading hobbyists.
Reading can be described as a way of communication between the author and the reader. Nobody can deny that reading is important at every stage of the life. Since the early childhood humans know how a book looks like and what it contains. Independent reading is the most important indicator of the future success of a child. Reading plunges humans into an impetuous world of books that are building up their viewpoints. It is possible at the age when you begin to realize that the scenes, facts and events which are clarified in the book can be compared with some real-life situations. It is undeniably important to take into consideration the frequency of reading and reading achievements.
It is necessary to explain that there are different opinions as to how to describe reading for enjoyment or as a hobby. Reading for pleasure refers to reading that humans do of their own will expecting the satisfaction which a person will get from the act of reading. Pleasure reading is related to age. To be more exact, it decreases in the teenage years and early adulthood, but increases again later in life. Studies show that reading for pleasure can promote and intensify the development of social skills among children. In addition, reading as a habit develops child’s fluency, vocabulary and general knowledge. In adults frequent reading contends with a feeling of loneliness and depression (Clark & Rumbold, 2006). It should be mentioned that there is evidence that reading for enjoyment increases better understanding of other cultures, social involvement, as well as provides a greater understanding of human nature and a favor decision-making process.
It is true to say that reading develops mind of a person who reads regularly. It improves one’s discipline and memory. When you schedule your time to reading, you evolve your self-control and discipline. The act of reading develops your memory by requiring you to remember a great variety of plot lines, figures, characters, themes, facts and details of the text. While reading, you follow the sequence of events illustrated in the book. Thanks to the expanded memory capacity and imagination, a well-read person can make good guesses and even ‘predict’ the story that the book unfolds. That in turn means that reading empowers mind to think, comprehend and analyze new information.
The essential point on which I differ is that the path of a reader is connected with analyzing and comprehending the hidden meaning of the work’s content. A book can be valued both for the work of the writer, but also for the imaginative work readers must do to reconstruct the meaning. A text is experienced ‘correctly’ when the audience feels, or at least understands the emotion the author intended to arouse. Thus, the bookworm’s goal is to understand what the author was trying to say or express. This is supported by the deep investigation of texts during interpretation. Through looking at cultural context, biography, background of the author and the history of bookmaking, we can understand specific elements of the book and probably specify the mental value of these segments to the author. Moreover, the process of reading with the help of the human’s imagination creates the pictures of places you have never been to, representations of sounds you have never heard and portrayals of situations you have never experienced.
It is interesting to speculate on the visualization of the facts and scenes presented in the book. That is the moment where painting and creativity work. As mentioned earlier, reading can convert textual words into images of unfamiliar places, things or situations that are described in the texts. The reader as an artist can express an episode from the book on paper regardless of his/her talent or aptitude. The key point is that nobody can teach another person how to perceive and sense (Baumann, 2010). While working on the painting, the connection between the artist and his work becomes more intimate and the prior intention of painting becomes more about complementing what the artist imagines and feels about the subject of the book he was impressed by into the paintings.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that reading is an aesthetic process involving human’s creativity and imagination. Reading is a form of a game that allows us to go through other worlds structured by the reader’s expectations. In other words, reading can be compared to a conversation between an author and a reader. The most important thing is that reading as a hobby has social and educational consequences and it is now clear that the benefits of reading are visible. It is personally very rewarding. Reading develops mind, keeps it active and dynamic, inspires you to create art, expands horizon, broadens your knowledge and unfolds new paths for you. On balance, reading is one of the most useful and enjoyable hobbies an individual can pursue.
References
Baumann, Stefan. (2010). Expressing Feeling in Your Paintings. Retrieved 2 April 2016, from http://www.stefanbaumann.com/expressing-feeling-in-your-paintings/
Clark C., Rumbold K. (2006). Reading for Pleasure: A research overview. National Literacy Trust. Retrieved 2 April 2016, from http://pennykittle.net/uploads/images/PDFs/Reports/Reading_pleasure_2006.pdf
