OUTSIDE THE OFFICE: Hobbies--You Asked About Hobbies?

Joan Pont, MD

Why do I pick hobbies that have the same (long) learning curve as medicine itself? Take weaving cloth, for example. People have been weaving for thousands of years. It is technologically demanding, takes a lot of equipment, your first few hundred attempts look like crap, and yet I persevere. Crazy, no?

For just a peek at what is involved with weaving sturdy enough cloth to go into a washing machine and dryer, there are about a thousand steps. Literally. Take my last project. Cut 1,296 lengths of yarn, three yards each, assorted in eight different colors. Wind these “warp” (longitudinal) threads on a loom around a roller called a warp beam. Then thread each end through a heddle, a piece of wire or string with an eye in the middle. The heddles on my loom are arranged on 16 different shafts. That represents one thousand two hundred ninety-six times when one can make a boo-boo. Mistakes jump out at you in the finished cloth like a run in a nylon stocking.

Then comes the traditional weaving part. You may have walked past someone weaving at a Renaissance Fair or lifestyle museum or an actual weaver earning their living doing their work. Lifting one or more heddles separates the warp threads, and creates a “shed” (the vertical space between the raised and unraised warp threads). The weaver throws a shuttle with the “weft” (transverse) thread through the shed, beats it down snugly with the “reed” (a comb-like apparatus), and repeats 1,296 times per yard.

I do not even think about the thousands of times I throw the shuttle. Definitely more throws than Matt Cain in a Giants game. Throwing the shuttle is like breathing. Do you think about how many breaths you took today?

Then comes the exaltation of completion. You can create something no one, in the thousands of years of human activity, has come up with before. My creations are unique, somehow satisfying, and they transport me to another century. Not that the other century was an easier or simpler time. They might not have had Medicare coding challenges, but they did have to store enough food to get from harvest to harvest and to avoid the Black Plague and various other epidemics.

I feel like I am working alongside all the previous weavers who ever lived and can build on their legacy to create new material. Literally, material.

I am coming to realize that I can learn nothing new; I am just recycling skills learned as a child. I was introduced to weaving when I was 12 years old by an awesomely nice neighbor who was a treasure and a talent.

My other hobby, riding horses, started even earlier, when I was 6 years old. Probably unsafe--no protective headgear in those days. I can only guess what my social-climbing mother was planning when she set out on this adventure. A Cold War aerospace engineer by day and horse-show mother by night. What was she thinking? That I would meet Prince Rainier and be asked out hunting? Oh well, for whatever crazy intentions she had, the passion stayed with me.

I rode from 6 to 18 years of age, riding upwards of 200 different horses and competing in three-day eventing, hunting, jumping and medal classes. I always thought I was terrible. Two people I trained with were Suzy Hutchison and Hap Hansen. Both went on to international careers, winning hundreds of Grand Prix jumping events each. My hat is off to each of them.

As college-bound kids do, I quit for a mere 35 years. Then, in 2007, a colleague asked, “Why don’t you ride again?” Ridiculous, I thought. After a 35-year gap, there is nothing left. But tempted, I signed up for some lessons. After five lessons, I again felt more comfortable sitting on a horse than sitting on a chair, more normal, more centered. I climbed back to a faint resemblance of high school-era ability through plenty of practice and hard work. Three days a week, five years later, this is what we look like: little jump, big dreams.

 

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Dr. Pont, an internist, is an assistant physician in chief at Kaiser San Rafael.

Email: joan.pont@kp.org