Pondering Irma

Last month Hurricane Harvey devastated parts of the Texas and the Gulf coast, dropping record amounts of rain and causing massive flooding. Now Hurricane Irma is bearing down on Florida and is expected to make landfall very soon. A good portion of the state has been ordered to evacuate and it's been about the only thing people seem to be talking about.

Thankfully my family is safe and I doubt we'll feel much of the effects of Irma here in the upstate of South Carolina, however I know (via Facebook) a few fellow collectors that have left their homes in Florida and it got me thinking...what what you do if you lost your collection?

For a lot of us, we have spent countless hours and money on our collections. From searching for items, money spent on acquiring said items and for some of us, money spent on upgrading the way we display our collections. Many of us know that there are far more important things in our lives than our hobbies and the collections we've built up, but put yourself for just a moment in the shoes of some of the people in the path of Irma.

Now if you lost everything you owned, your home, your car(s), every possession you had, then obviously losing a collection of toys or video games is small potatoes. However let's just say for arguments sake that you lost your toy collection to a natural disaster. What do you do? Do you try to rebuild it in some capacity? Or do you just walk away?

I've been giving this a lot of thought over the last few days as I've watched the weather forecasts and watched Hurricane Irma grow in size and intensity. If you follow this blog, then you've probably noticed the other blogs on the sidebar. I have many hobbies and thus have many collections. Toys, video games, comic books, trading cards...if it's collectible I probably have collected it at some point. While these earthly possessions are prized and important, they aren't my life. That said if something took them all away, like a natural disaster, I think I'd be done.

I love my hobbies and I find a lot of enjoyment and peace in what I do. However if faced with what some will be faced with, I don't think I could see myself taking the time and money to rebuild my collections. Most likely I'd have other more important things to focus on for one, but two I just think the massive loss would just kill the desire to collect again. I could see myself re-buying perhaps one of my modern video game consoles, but rebuilding my G1 Transformers collection...sadly no.

What would you do if you were faced with a potential devastating storm rolling through your home? Rebuild the collection or walk away? I'd love to hear your comments.