Physical activity

Physical activity is important for stillness, and cultivating a hobby is a good place to start.

By anyone’s standards, Winston Churchill’s life was productive. By age 26, he’d been elected to the British parliament. He would continue to serve in government over the course of six and a half decades. As Britain’s wartime prime minister, he helped defeat Nazism. He also wrote over 40 books and gave more than two thousand speeches throughout his long and prolific life.

Churchill might seem like the last person from whom we would expect stillness, but in fact, he possessed the quality in abundance. And his life was a prime example of one particular method for bringing peace and stillness to even the busiest life: taking care of yourself physically.

Churchill’s physical activity of choice was bricklaying, which was unusual, to say the least. He learned from two of his employees at his Chartwell estate, and soon fell in love with the meditative process of mixing mortar, trowelling it on and stacking up the bricks.

In a 1927 letter to then-Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, Churchill wrote that he had enjoyed a delightful month. Alongside his duties as a minister, he had written 2,000 words a day and also laid 200 bricks.

According to Churchill’s daughter Mary, bricklaying and her father’s other much-loved hobby, painting, were more than just pastimes. They were also his primary antidotes for the depression to which he was prone. Both activities allowed him an intellectual escape and, crucially, an opportunity to exercise his body.

Cultivating mind and body can be a huge step toward becoming even a fraction as productive as Churchill, and a hobby is an ideal way to do so. That’s why so many of the great figures in history were also hobbyists on the side. A generation before Churchill, four-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom William Gladstone took up chopping down trees. John Cage became a mushroom hunter, and the South American revolutionary Simón Bolívar danced. 

So consider what physical activity might help release you from the pressures of your work or life and allow you to find the stillness that Gladstone found in the thwack of axe on oak, or that Churchill found in the slap of mortar on brick. But whatever you choose, you shouldn’t take things too far, as we’ll see in our final blink.