As a kid, I was an avid baseball card collector. My brother and I would regularly ride our bikes down to the nearby 7-Eleven convenience store, purchase as many packs as our weekly chore money would reasonably allow, then pedal home to open them. Some of the packs would prove to be gold mines with the cards of All-Star players or hometown favorites showing up in the middle of the pack. Sadly, other packs left us disappointed with cards we already had or cards of unknown back-up players from the teams we didn’t like. Regardless of the outcome though, there was something thrilling about the physical experience of shuffling through a newly-opened Topps baseball card package, hoping for a good haul.
Year over year, our card collection grew until sometime around the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a new trend in card collecting emerged. Rather than expanding a collection as we were doing by purchasing packs of cards one by one from convenience stores, the more serious collectors had now turned professional, in a sense, making direct buys from the baseball card companies themselves. These dealers would order several sets of the entire season’s offerings from Topps and the other big card companies, then fish out the most desired cards—usually the first-year rookie cards of promising players—to sell these separately at lucrative prices to the more casual collectors at card conventions or brick and mortar stores set up for this purpose.
As these card enthusiasts continued to get more and more sophisticated, collecting became a bigger business, and soon the most ardent among them had become expert investors, buying hundreds of cards of all the first-year players who might become perennial All Stars. If these one-day, would-be Hall of Famers stayed on such a trajectory—not unlike a rising stock—the holder of the card would make a big profit. Other prospects though would flame out with an injury or simply not pan out, leading to a loss for the less savvy dealer.
I dipped into this world of speculating in baseball cards briefly, making some bets on a few players with some modest purchases, but I have some friends who got much more involved. They made a little money here and there, but also remain to this day the proud owners of hundreds of Joe Magrane and Kevin Mitchell rookie cards, players who had respectable careers, but in the end fell squarely into the “didn’t pan out” category in terms of the value of their cards. For my part, I didn’t play in the baseball card speculation sandbox long because I realized the thing I most liked about baseball card collecting was the actual baseball cards—opening the packs and how that made me feel.
While certainly there’s a time to put our childish pursuits and the hobbies of our youth away, it’s also true that sometimes we let the ways of the world crush things that were once and, with some wise attending, might remain fair and lovely to us. More than perhaps we realize, a big part of living wisely and well is to take measure of the things we love and to love them in the right way. To learn to hold on to them earnestly but a little bit more loosely also.
All this is to say, we have to attend to our affections. Don’t lose the joy of using the talents you’ve been given. Don’t permit a lively interest in something good to become immoderate. Don’t allow a beautiful aesthetic preference to become a rigid box that stunts your creativity. Don’t let a healthy interest in any subject morph into obsession.
I recently read an article that cited a Jungian therapist named James Hollis who suggested we develop a habit of asking ourselves some iteration of this insightful question: “Is this thing I’m doing enlarging me or diminishing me?”
It’s a terrific question that draws out some of the most deep-seated intuitions we hold about ourselves. Somewhere in my young adulthood, collecting baseball cards, at least in the way I had come to do it, had crossed over from being something wondrous and expansive to my soul to something else. This question would have revealed this right away. Perhaps we should get into the habit of asking it: Is this thing before me and the way I’m engaging with it enlarging or diminishing to my soul? I expect answering it honestly will help us discern how to live wisely and well in the days ahead.
God—Help me pursue those endeavors which enlarge rather than diminish my soul. Amen.
