When the only thing separating you from a fun hobby is motivation and effort

Until recently when I sold them, I owned three saxophones: an alto, a baritone, and a 100-year-old C melody. I kept them in my office/computer/music room upstairs.

I loved playing them, but I never actually did.

I also have a telescope in our basement storage room that I've used to observe the craters of the moon, the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter. I'm always amazed at what I see through the viewfinder, but I haven't brought it out in probably two years.

This is not to mention the shelves full of books I don't read or the running gear that sits unused in my closet because all I do these days exercise-wise is lift weights and walk.

What unites all of these activities is the fact that (a) I enjoy them, and (b) I never seem to do them.

And the only reason I don't do them is because I can never seem to drum up the motivation.

Not that any of them requires extraordinary motivation and effort. The worst thing with the saxophones, for example, was getting them out of the case, putting them together, and warming them up so I could play music.

This isn't difficult, but it was apparently a barrier to entry for me because whenever I thought about playing, I would instead decide that another game of solitaire on my phone was preferable to, you know, actually walking up the stairs and pulling out one of my horns.

The telescope is even easier to use. Just bring it up from the storage room, go out in the driveway and point it at the sky. I know how to find stuff from there, but...well, I'm on the couch petting the cat, you see, and that's a whole lot easier.

I'm realizing that life would be more fun if I could force myself to give the slightest effort whenever I'm not working or engaged in some household chore.

Is this because I'm 55 years old? Am I stuck in some sort of rut? Or has my iPhone turned me into a slug?

The answer is probably yes to all three.

Here's the good news, though: I'm very close to buying myself a nice, intermediate-level alto sax from my instrument repair and sales guy, Jon-O. And when I do, I plan to play it regularly. At least once a week.

Really, I will.

Of course, the saxophone requires a lot of air and mental energy, neither of which my phone's Yahtzee app requires of me, so...you know...maybe it's still kind of a toss-up.

I have a telescope. There are maybe four cool things I can see with it.

Saturn isn't quite this big in my telescope, but it's still awesome.

A few years ago, a church friend gave me an old Jason telescope from Sears that he wasn't using.

It isn't exactly the Hubble Space Telescope or anything, but it's certainly more powerful than anything I've ever had.

I've figured out how to do the following things with it:

• I look closely at the craters of the moon. I never tire of doing this. For whatever reason, the view seems better when viewing a crescent moon vs. a full moon. Or at least the craters appear to be more sharply outlined on the crescent moon.
• I zero in on Saturn and can clearly see its rings. This is also extremely cool, though it's still not much larger than a sharply defined dot in the viewfinder. Still, you can see those rings, which on average are about 800 million miles away from Earth. Given how long it takes light to cover that distance, it means that what I see in my telescope is how Saturn looked more than an hour earlier. I think that's pretty amazing.
• I train the scope on Jupiter and can see its four largest moons (Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto). I can barely make out the bands of Jupiter itself, but those moons are all very visible, if still pinpricks.
• I have also taken a look at both Mars and Venus, and while they're definitely bigger in the telescope than when viewed with the naked eye, there's really not that much to see in terms of detail.

I could probably see nebulae, other parts of the Milky Way, and maybe even a larger galaxy or two(?) if I took the telescope to an area with less light pollution and knew where and how to find these things. 

But really, just seeing a few planets and the sharply defined features of the moon from my driveway is more than reason enough to haul it up from the basement once or twice a week.