It Can Take Over Your Life

I had an annoying habit my freshman year: I picked up litter. Not just mine. Everybody’s. I never felt very altruistic about it, though—only increasingly burdened.

It would happen on my walks up and down Science Hill, the urge to clean. First a gum wrapper. Then an outdated flyer, a plastic bottle—anything that lay beside the sidewalk. I’d hold the items, at first, between thumb and forefinger; then, as they multiplied, would clutch them in a fist. By the time I reached Sterling Chemistry Laboratory, I would have a heap atop the three-ring binder cradled in my arms, usually a dozen scraps of days-old paper toppling over, threatening to sail off in the breeze. I’d dump them into a wastebasket, thinking this was not the way life was meant to be.

It may have begun as concern for the environment: the if-everybody-does-a-little-the-world-would-be-a-better-place romance. Eventually, to saunter past litter seemed to telegraph an attitude about as apathetic as the one that tossed it on the ground. What an unglorifying statement, I would think, if a Christian walked by garbage and didn’t even try to clean it up. Shouldn’t one exert that extra effort, go the extra mile—in every part of his life, not just obvious or traditional or more convenient parts? Even so, as time went on, my inability to break the habit bothered me more than the litter itself.

I made rules. First was “no compromise”: I would pick up everything. If I saw a potato chip wrapper on the grass, I picked it up. In doing so, if the corner of my eye caught a torn magazine photo a few feet off, I picked that up, too. Then, the new angle would give me a glimpse of an empty Snapple bottle across the street. A glance at the bottle hauled into view a whole tract of trash stretching another half a block, which would no doubt require hours to remove.

Shouldn’t I pick up all of that? Or do I care more about getting to class on time, about grades and success, than I do about being a non-compromising Christian? Won’t I give complete devotion? And so I would stand there, taut in dilemma, as organic chemistry began.

The problem? I was seeing too much refuse, of course. Why, if I saw less, I would have to pick up less. And so I began walking to class with a reinforced rigidity of neck, a field of vision narrowed to the path before me. And whenever I bent over to pick up items, the nuchal-cranial angle didn’t deviate. This new solution reduced the load I brought to the top of Science Hill or, on return trips, to Woolsey Rotunda.

Yet, this still seemed a rather questionable way of going about life. The rule had to be amended.

Only pick up litter that’s on the sidewalk, I told myself. That way, I can get to class on time and still be reasonably Christian as far as litter is concerned. This worked except when a piece of litter lay on the grass only a few inches from the sidewalk. Too bad, I’d say, I’m not picking it up.

Am I so small of heart, so legalistic, that I can’t accommodate a few inches?, a voice inside me would say. I would walk on despite the voice—the spurned paper scrap more distant with each step. If in the course of this internal debate I happened to get far enough from the scrap, the very distance would bar me, I thought, from retracing my steps to retrieve it. The strategy’s very disingenuousness disturbed me even more, however. Rather than enabling escape, each step reinforced my duplicity and left me uncomfortably walking further and further from a scrap which, at this point, seemed quite easy to have picked up a block ago. Yet, I would press on, step after miserable step. Why, if I turned around now, I’d be more of a fool than I already was! But, then again, wasn’t there the greater issue of walking away from my conscience?

Sooner or later, I would spin around and return to that paper scrap—sometimes halting and turning again, only to halt again, and turn again, and halt, and turn. I would snatch the scrap up and ask, “Now why didn’t I just do that in the beginning?” Then I’d resolve to pick up garbage at first sight—a resolution which sometimes regressed to my original approach of picking up everything I saw.

So the habit flourished, particularly miserable after rainy days (which work terribly on the texture of refuse). Why, really, did I do this? I had never been compulsive before college. God had given me several responsibilities in life: as student, son, friend, to name a few. Why did I think that ad-hoc street cleaning was one of them? Why did I believe, at least sometimes, that it trumped my academic responsibilities?

Compulsiveness emerged in other areas of life as well. In bed, I couldn’t sleep unless I had prayed for the half-dozen or so members of my family who lived in America. If I didn’t pray long for any given member, I felt I at least had to mention his or her name. I also felt a compulsion to say the Lord’s prayer every night. I told myself that the authenticity of my intentions and my relationship with God mattered, not the observance of a ritual that could mask deteriorating motivations. Yet—and this is the striking thing—nothing I did, no intellectual argument I told myself, no chiding could dispel the sense of dread that stole over me if I was not devout in maintaining these traditions. Nothing could remove the sense of incompleteness or persistent and vague disapproval. Sometimes this voice, gesturing toward the wreckage that earnestness toward God seemed to leave behind, suggested that life would probably be better without it all, or without Him.