Avocations (AKA hobbies or pastimes) mean “to be called away” from your main work.

Recreation recreates us—and our ability to do creative work. It also refreshes us for whatever work we do.

Though not central to our professional lives, both avocation and recreation are crucial to:

• our health, both mental and physical
• the work we do
• those who must endure us—and sometimes love us

Yet, they’re not merely a means to an end. They are “autotelic”: serving as ends in themselves.

Like all mammals, we learn by playing.

Yet, some people and cultures (ahem! Looking at you, Americans) face discomfort with this playful side.

Too often, we keep our work and play separate: “I work hard. Then I play hard.”

Better to put play in your work—and work in your play.

 

In your ARC session, we can grapple with such issues:

• Integration: if / how to mix your avocation/recreation with other parts of your life:
  • Family (& friends) doing with them vs. time apart

 Avocation -> vocation?

• • Volunteering as a means to explore a new career
  • (How) can you turn your passion project into a profitable one? Or do you risk killing the fun, the passion—and the escape it provides?

 Cultivating opportunities for your avocations and more recreation overall:

plan out a sabbatical, a workcation, your “pretirement”…

 

• How to redesign your main job to allow you to invest effort, focus and time to:
  • reconnect with a hobby
  • explore new recreation/avocation opportunities

 Reflect: what does your recreation and avocation tell you about yourself? Your choices (e.g. your roles and responsibilities, tendencies, how you value, with whom you recreate…) when you’re not bound by a job description, office politics, etc. are much more reflective of who you are—and can become.

• • How can you apply those lessons and preferences to your daily work?

Stefan Bielski has long mingled his work and play—and encouraged others to do the same.

He leveraged his post-collegiate nightlife pursuits within a new, foreign city into a lifestyle magazine. There he recruited the office-bound (banker, IP lawyer, advertising executive, tax accountant, textile manager…) to write on leisure, recreation, and after-hours fun. Upon selling that magazine business (still published, 25+ years on), he, still in his 20s, retired for over a year. In that extended time off, he began to develop his “retire early, retire often” philosophy.

Long before the terms were coined, Stefan was a “digital nomad” and took “Workcations” in the 1990s. Long before Covid lockdowns popularized “WFH”, he began to “Work from Boat” in 2016. Then, he won the grand prize, 100 days aboard the coworking, co-living catamaran Coboat in the Mediterranean. In his entrepreneur-in-residencies there and at Georgetown University, he helped “wantrepreneurs” turn their passion projects into viable businesses. He’s coached, consulted, and mentored an amateur archeologist, holistic healers and culinary, graphic, & performing artists, Active in writing groups on four continents, he’s critiqued and encouraged memoirists, novelists, poets, and satirists. He’s also tried on all those roles himself.

As a sailing coach and instructor, Stefan has helped the overemployed make more time for recreation.  And he spent the past three winters snowbirding with retired people of all ages living aboard their sailboats. His Sail-lore.com project features more of his writings on the nexus of sail and soul, creation and recreation, vocation and avocation.