Who doesn’t pick up seashells when they take a leisurely stroll along the beach – watching the waves lap up the sand you are walking on?
At an early age, I was hooked on stamp collecting when our neighbor showed me the beautiful stamps she had collected during her travels as well as those stamped envelops she received from her pen pals from different countries! [Yes, Virginia, we used to have pen pals – and snail mail during the late 1960’s took almost a month to get from the Philippines to other parts of the world – on average!]
Although I did start a meager collection of stamps myself, I moved on to collecting books since I loved to read. My Dad started us off with his purchase of the Britannica Encyclopedia with Aesop’s Fables volumes offered at a discount. Then I latched on to the Nancy Drew series, the Hardy Boys, then graduated to my Dad’s collection of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason, Dannay & Lee’s Ellery Queen and Ian Fleming’s James Bond series (which I could not touch until I was ‘of age’).
The early 1980’s came and my family immigrated to the USA, the ‘habit’ continued and I started buying the teaspoons & pins from each state we visited. Then, like a true-blue Californian, my more serious collection of anything Mickey Mouse became an obsession! Well, the Starbucks mugs were so appropriate for a coffee drinker while the ref magnets from each country/city visited are so much easier to carry when you want to tote only one luggage from one country to another. Anyway, my collection went hand-in-hand with the stages in my life…and they became more creative.
Since I entered the exciting world of travel, I had built up voluminous amounts of maps, itineraries, postcards and personal photos which translated themselves into several scrapbooks….until I discovered a photo album service and I was hooked. Scanned all of those materials and have “published” about a dozen of them so far! The good thing about it is that I get to dispose heaps of travel stuff and minimized the amount of documents and paperwork I had to keep. And so, I had come full circle – from collecting the books I read to compiling and publishing my very own photo books!
This reminds me of a statement my brother, Bing, made when he saw the number of photos and video footage my husband and I accumulated through just a few years of travel – “Wouldn’t it be better if you enjoy everything around you, take snapshots with your eyes, and fill your being with the beauty of what’s out there? You’re missing out when you see through the lenses of a camera!” Those words stuck with me – and I continue to refer back to them whenever I get too busy recording important moments when I should be “in the moment”!
And that brings me into the why and wherefore of collecting per se. I believe that it is normal for us humans to keep close anything we consider ‘important’. Our desire to ‘have and hold’ is but an outward manifestation of what is really our motivation for collecting anything – in short, memories.
When everything else is said and done – and all else is just gone – the only thing that no one can take from us are our remembrances. Each one of those collectibles can bring me back to that specific moment in time and would conjure up memory-slices that may give me either a smile or a frown…even a tear.
So, my advice? Wherever you are – enjoy the moment and give thanks for being there!