For most of us, stamp collecting is a hobby. My old college dictionary defines a hobby as "a subject or pursuit of absorbing interest, undertaken primarily for pleasure during one's leisure time". Today's world has many interesting and diverse ways of absorbing every free minute we might have - television, radio, books, movies, games, and computers. If you have children, there's the numerous ways they have of stealing every free minute we used to have - taking them to and picking them up from school and other activities eats up hundreds of hours just by itself! Sometimes this leaves us little time for our hobbies. Frequently, these are the times when we need that few minutes spent in our leisurely activities the most.
Many people take the beginning of a new year as the time to make "resolutions". What we need as stamp collectors is to take the time to decide what we want from our hobby during the coming year. I've set down a few possible goals we should think seriously about for the coming collecting year:
| Pleasure | A hobby is supposed to be entered into primarily for the pleasure it brings to us. Our hobby should bring us pleasure when we engage in it, whether it's for a few minutes for for hours at a time. Sometimes we begin a hobby, thinking it will bring us pleasure, and it doesn't. Sometimes, we gain pleasure for awhile, but then the interest wanes, and there is no longer any pleasure associated with it. Sometimes our hobbies become such a part of our life, they're almost like another job, rather than something that brings us pleasure. Sometimes, we get so bogged down in the day-to-day activities of maintaining our collection that we fail to take a few minutes and enjoy it! Set aside some time this coming year just to enjoy the pleasure your collection brings to you. A good way to enjoy your hobby is to share it with someone else who also enjoys that hobby. | ||||||
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| Interest | What do you find to be the most interesting thing about stamp collecting? Is it the hunt for a rare item to fill a vacant spot? Is it the pleasure of sorting through thousands of items from a bulk purchase, in hope of finding that elusive treasure? Is it the simple joys of adding new material to your collection, or of learning more about the stamps you have? Do you enjoy reading about the places shown on a particular stamp? Perhaps you've had the opportunity to visit some of the countries you collect, and you can remember visiting some of those places shown. My father worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad for 32 years. I have a small perfin collection of stamps perforated "MP//RR" - the only non-official perfin I collect. It's something that interests me. My daughter began collecting stamps when she found out there were stamps depicting pandas and dolphins, two creatures she's intensely interested in. One of my friends from my military career was intensely interested in maps and mapping: his stamp collecting interests include the same subjects. He once told me that stamps were the only way he could ever "own" some of the earliest maps made!
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