That is Collect!

Some people collect old glass; some collect bottle caps; some collect baseball or basketball or football or Pokemon or professional wrestling trading cards. Some collect coins or stamps or both. And if you happen to be my grandmother, you collect just about, well, let's simply say it's a whole of anything and everything, most of which amounts to half of nothing, for thirty or forty years, until you lose all recollection of what you have collected and stored away in all that time. I myself have collected many things in the last two decades or so, including a little bit of most of the aforementioned items, books, stamps, coins, trading cards. At the time, I felt it was quite a fun and interesting endeavor, but most of the those collections have been eventually and systematically categorized, discontinued, and stored away in a box or ten somewhere in the attic. Except for my books, of course (That is the only collection of mine which is currently being augmented).

Now, what is it about the simple pastime, namely collecting things, which seems to pervade so much our, and many other, societies? Why do people feel the need to gather bits and pieces of whatsoever-it-be, even to the point of willingly, perhaps even passionately, rummaging through other people's old stuff like the men from American Pickers merely to satisfy some sort of odd urge to find a pin-sized unicorn in a Salvation Army haystack? In my book-buying excursions at sundry times, I have been and usually am forced to compete with these sorts on a frequent basis. Some might even label me as one of them. I have observed these thrift store vultures picking the cheap gray metal shelves over, piece by piece, weighing each tidbit of junk to ascertain whether or not it might yet retain some sort of value, or if it ought to be returned to its comfortable nest among the neighboring junk heaps. Most often, it is the latter which occurs. Nevertheless, once in a while, they find something so unexpected, so precious, so wallet-friendly as to cause in them an undeniable need to possess the object, which they grab like greedy children and hold to their swelling bosoms as though they had found the very Christ child in a thrift store manger while, rather than a new star shining in the heavens overhead, the blinking lights of an untidy billboard proclaim a blowout sale on a newly donated collection of porcelain dolls.

But they do not worship the thing itself. Oh, no, the whole endeavor does not have at its core the object itself as the objective of the search. Rather, it is the search itself which draws them on. It is the collecting, not the collection, which keeps them going. The intrinsic thrill of searching and finding holds in itself the reward of the process, while possessing a thing has little or none.

Ultimately, everyone is looking for something. But coins and stamps and old Coca-Cola bottles have nothing on answers to the questions raised by a life spent searching for meaning. And meaning is only one of a few things in life which contains within itself a vast reward in searching, in finding, and in possessing.