Hobbyists are not always amateurs, in fact as someone said to me, do anything for fifty years you get reasonably good at it. The importance of hobbies is to have something you enjoy that takes your mind away from other things, to have that time when you concentrate on something ‘else’. Or when in doing something with your hands you are able to think about things more calmly.
Many years ago I heard a UK politician extolling the first Elizabethan Age for a time when politicians and all learned people wrote poetry. When, he said, Walter Raleigh was sacking Cadiz no one told him to go home and write poetry, and when he was writing poetry no one told him to get on a ship and sack Cadiz. The point being that modern politicians do not write enough poetry, do not take on the intellectual challenge, and there is a reason. In todays’ world people would read it with derision because they are not writing it and they would criticise a politician saying he should concentrate on more serious matters.
Actually politics and poetry are two sides of the same coin: the thoughts that preoccupy our greatest poets: the human condition, are the daily fare of politicians. I would welcome knowing our politicians write poetry on occasions to look at their world from a different perspective, the keep in contact with their inner feelings and of course to make sure they were not sacking Cadiz because that is one hobby we can do without.