The Daring Dilettante

What is a Daring Dilettante? A Daring Dilettante is somebody who finds Delight in their activities. Whether they ’re focused on a single passion such as cooking, or many passions such as cooking, writing, hiking and painting. The Daring part comes in when you stop hiding your passions from yourself and admit that you find joy and delight in your favorite activities. On the surface, this doesn’t seem like a “Daring” thing. Admitting that you find joy in cooking, what is the big deal? Admitting that you like to paint? Or hike? Or write? How is this daring, courageous or even hard? Unfortunately, admitting that you find joy in anything these days is practically an act of courage. Finding pleasure in anything, whether it ’s the exotic or the mundane is often criticized by the people around us and in many different ways. A woman who expresses her joy in cooking might hear: “Cooking? You have time for that ? I can barely find time to pick up the take out on the way home from work...

The toughest part about life, whether you are a kid or an adult, is figuring out how to create a balance between the things you have to do, and the things you want to do. Mostly because what gets mixed up in there are things you think you should do. It can be brutally hard to separate the things you have to do from the things you think   you should do. Knowing what you want to do is generally pretty easy, but you may not get to them because of all the things you have to do and think you have to do get in the way. For example, I want to write my own blog, knit a cable knit hood and start a modest crafting business. I also want to play video games, take long naps, construct the coolest container garden any one in this apartment complex has ever seen and continue to advance at my day job at the Corner of Happy & Healthy. I want to raise my daughter to be courageous, compassionate, strong, generous and independent. The things I have to do are pay the bills, clean the...