A Philosophy of Passions

by David Petersen

Blog Last Updated; 4/6/2009

"Why," my wife Caroline asks more often than I find necessary, "Why do you persist in working so hard to build wooden longbows that mostly break even before you finish them, or blow up within the first few hundred shots? And even when you do get one to hold together, you shoot it for awhile, then swap it off, give it away, or sell it at a loss. How can you justify that?"

"Justify"?

Ah, our beloved spousal units ? those lovely live-in consciences!

But Caroline is right of course, at least from a literalistic, bean-counter point of view. Were I ever to tally all my incremental and ongoing investments in bow-building ? the raw materials (Osage staves and boards, bamboo backing, glue, epoxy, stain, finish, take-down sleeves ?), plus all the specialty hand tools I've "had" to buy (drawknives, scrapers, C-clamps, rasps, round and triangular files, coping saw ?), and all the power tools (table saw, band saw, belt sander ?), not to mention a small library of instructional and motivational bow-making books ? add all that up and divide by the small number of successful bows I have at hand to show for it ? and yes, both materially and "logically," my bow-building passion is unjustifiable; a losing proposition.

Obviously, there's something not so obvious going on here that stretches well beyond the merely practical and stands as a metaphor for countless other financially and logically unjustifiable hobby-passions held so dear by literally millions of fools like me everywhere: hunting, fishing, skiing, climbing, bicycling, ? not to mention art and myriad other forms of collecting. Why do we persist in hobbies that become passions that cost rather than save or earn us money; ventures that dominate weeks of our time annually and which result, in my case, in mediocre product ? when I/we could be fishing, exploring new hunting territory, or even just reading a good book instead?

Why, indeed?

As old friend Abbey would respond to such intimate questions of quirky personal choice ? Well, why the hell not?

I mean, how many of our primary passions in life can we really justify materially, financially, or by any other "rational" means?

Hunting? I don't dare attempt to tally here the poor-man's fortune I've spent on my "back to basics" passions for traditional archery and bowhunting across half a century of indulgence, for fear my wife might read it.

Fishing? As a kid in mid-century Oklahoma, adequately equipped with cane pole and can of worms, and with fish-filled creeks, rivers, lakes, and ponds readily abundant within bicycle or parent-chauffeuring range, my angling was at least modestly profitable at the dinner table. But alas, there is no such meaty profit in the gear-laden, Cabelas-clad, confused way most of us have been brainwashed by industry and media to attack angling today.

The point is, not everything we do can or even should be measured financially much less "logically." Contrarily, it's precisely the illogic of our woodsy passions that lead them to account for many of life's best moments and memories. Hobbies of passion are the things we do in order to endure the crushing boredom we suffer in the workaday world of doing things we insist on being paid to do in order to earn the money we need to do the things we really want to do, and round and round she goes. What it boils down to is that we were designed by nature to be an active and functional part of nature, and a few of us still know it.

So yeah, why not "waste" some time and money building bows I don't really need and which rarely if ever will approach the functionality, beauty, or reliability of their professionally crafted counterparts?

Recently, fellow bowyer George "Jawg" Tsoukalas brought it down to this:"You may find, as I have, that sometimes the journey is enough. More bows I do not need. More bow-making I do need."

By George! That's it!

The journey is the trip!

In fact, Jawg's "unjustifiable" line of reasoning might even explain, at least to fellow veteran hunters if not to our doubting spouses and other critics, why it was, this past elk season, that I hunted 30 days and got in close amongst ?em almost every day, passed up gift-quality shots more times than I can recall ? and ended the season, by conscious choice, without ever loosing an arrow.