What is an Amateur?

    What is an amateur? Is it someone new at an activity?  Someone inept and inexperienced? Can an amateur be an expert at their activity?

    I have always been a huge fan of the Nancy Drew books.  When I was younger, it was for the adventure and the mystery.  Now that I'm older, I still enjoy them as a good way to just relax, plus I find it fascinating how they were created, and how they have changed over the years.  Nancy Drew is the classic amateur detective.  But after solving 56 mysteries in the original series alone, one can hardly call her inept or inexperienced.  No, her "amateur" standing comes from the fact that she doesn't solve mysteries because she is paid to do it, or because she has been professionally trained  - she does it because she loves to do it.

  G. K. Chesterton once wrote: "The word amateur has come by the thousand oddities of language to convey an idea of tepidity; whereas the word itself has the meaning of passion. Now is this peculiarity confined to the mere form of the word; the actual characteristic of these nameless dilettanti is a genuine fire and reality. A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame or money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.  Such a man must love the toils of the work more than any other man can love the rewards of it."  The word amateur is from the french, meaning "one who loves." An amateur may indeed be quite good her craft, but she needn't be.  She need only love it.

   I am an amateur.  I do many many things,  simply because I love to do them, or occasionally because I love the one I do them for.  I say I am the rambling amateur both because I have a tendency to be long winded when I write, and also because I have so many different hobbies that I rarely stay with just one for long.  And I'm always eager to learn something new, whether it is in one of my current interests or in the pursuit of a new one.  If I am an expert in anything, it is in being an amateur.

   It has been a long time since I have posted on this blog, and many things have changed in the last four years.  But now I return, as I so often return to my hobbies.  I come back with new knowledge and new ideas, and I am eager to learn more.  I have more focus now, on what this blog is.  It is the blog of a Rambling Amateur, to share what I learn and discover, and how I discovered it.