Tuesday, December 6, 2016

A Bright Hobby: Collecting Glows

 Yesterday I wrote about the gift of light.  Which got me thinking about flashlights. Did you know collecting flashlights is very popular?  There are even flashlight museums and conventions.  What an illuminating hobby (sorry, just had to lighten this up with a pun). 

Anyway, giving light, flashlights and hobbies got me thinking about an old, old book, Try Giving Yourself Away (1923) by David Dunn.  In it, he writes about his unique hobby— the hobby of giving himself away. 

“Fortunately,” Dunn writes, “each of us has a different assortment of gifts, so there could never be anything standardized about giving away, even though every one of us were to take up the hobby.”

In general, here are a few things we can each give our families, daily work contacts, even fleeting contacts with strangers:
Spare time
Spare money
Mental or physical energy
Special art, skill, or talent
The ability to organize
The gift of ideas, imagination, leadership

And all of us can give a spark of:
Appreciation
Kindness
Interest
Understanding
Encouragement
Tolerance

Everyone we meet can use a little spark to help light his or her path.  And here’s an added benefit to this hobby:  We get to “collect” the warm glow that fills our hearts each time we give these gifts.  As author Ben Sweetland wrote, “We cannot hold a torch to light another’s path without brightening our own.” 

Besides, the glows that we collect from our new hobby won’t take up any shelf space in our home and never need dusting.

Carpe Diem Life,

David Kuhn
CarpeDiem-Life.com

1 comment:

  1. I am impressed. I don't think Ive met anyone who knows as much about this subject as you do. You are truly well informed and very intelligent. You wrote something that people could understand and made the subject intriguing for everyone. Really, great blog you have got here. Collecting hobby

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