Sometimes life gets you down. That should almost be an eyeroll-inducing statement; of course that’s true. We’ve heard enough songs and seen enough inspirational movies to know life gets you down, but you just have to bring yourself back up, things get better, et cetera. By now, we don’t need songs and movies to tell us this; we’ve all had these moments, we’re all adults here, and we know life isn’t ‘fair.’ There is no surefire way to rid ourselves of all our woes and worries and stay in the light, but I may have happened upon the next best thing. Hobby Lobby.

Yes. Hobby Lobby.

Now before you groan and exit out of this blog, let me make my points.

For starters, let me clarify and say I am not advocating for money to be spent, nor have I ever worked for that company; nor does Texas A&M have any associations with them (legal disclaimer over), and I have no reason to be writing specifically about them besides the fact that I went to one for the first time this weekend. Just being in the bizarre and wonderful space that is Hobby Lobby is enough to make things better, even if it’s only temporary. Temporary is better than no fixes at all.

Hobby Lobby is a place where time ceases to exist. If time ceases to exist, so do your problems because you can live in the moment, or rather, in every season all at once. Permanent holiday décor of every season encompasses the outer rims of the store to the point where you’re pretty sure it’s September, but you better check your phone just in case. If holidays aren’t your thing, they have everything else you could possibly think of looking at. And as weird as window shopping is, knowing you’re not going to buy some of the items you look at makes you enjoy them that much more. Did I need the sign of Ned Flanders greeting neighbors? No. Did it make me and my fiancé laugh? Yes. And that’s all it needed to do. It didn’t need to sell me on where in my apartment it would go. It didn’t need to make sense. It just existed, and for that, I thank it.

The second-best part of Hobby Lobby is that unlike other “magical places on earth” you do not need to travel very far to get to it and enjoy the ambiance of a store that, counter to its name, has everything well past hobby supplies. Again, I’m not advocating to purchase anything, so it is a lot cheaper than any other travel destinations, and because it’s nearby, it’s cheap on gas too. The magical part is actually going to the store, so window shopping online does not provide the same amount of comfort and ability to make your worries melt away. It’s a perfect place to escape the house for an adventure. Who needs to spend money traveling the country when you can just walk around a Hobby Lobby décor section which covers the United States in representation? That is no exaggeration. There’s a whole mountain cabin section with bears and moose, something I’m pretty sure Texans do not relate to, but as a Northeasterner, I loved.

As much as I’m going on about this store, truly, I am using it as a placeholder for the concept that we don’t need to have big adventures or spend a lot of money to have meaning and joy in our lives, to turn our lives to the light. I think that gets forgotten in today’s world with social media. Sometimes we need to remember the little things that can make us stay afloat, and sure, it’s not as flashy as being a world traveler, but it could be just as important to our mental health. We’re going to have tough weeks as graduate students, and we will need things to keep us in the light and away from our self-imposed caves (a much harder task with the invention of Netflix), and I think that things like taking a run to Hobby Lobby is the simplest and least scary way to keep ourselves in the light. It’s less commitment than a weekend away, so if you are busy, you can really just do a quick stop. Maybe you’d rather be dead than step foot in a Hobby Lobby; fine, that’s fair – and something I heard from my fiancé many a time until I finally convinced him to go with me – but try to find your own little cheap and quick patch of sunshine. Not everything has to be huge and momentous to keep us happy or free us from worries. Sometimes it’s something small that’ll brighten your day the most.

– Cara Deromedi

Cara is a doctoral student in the Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology.