One of the things that I read and hear from gurus online is that to help with your own happiness you should try to do a random act of kindness every day. They give examples about people buying somebody else's coffee in the Starbucks drive through or buying somebody's meal in the fast food drive through and those are great! I tend to drift toward things that nobody will really notice or remember just because I don't want to brag or get some sort of return on what I'm doing. At least not from other people.
I don't do it always but I try to pick up a piece of trash every day. I see it as helping keep things nice and clean throughout the day. Of helping somebody who may have missed the garbage can when they were throwing something away. And helping make the janitor's life a little bit easier having the garbage all in one place instead of having to clean up after people.
I have to be careful about it though. I don't want to become judgmental of others but it would be easy to. My wife and I went to an amusement park recently and we enjoyed the rides and seeing all the people out and about without masks and back to normal life before coded 19 rocked our world.
Around 6:30 in the evening we started looking for the expensive food that we could eat for dinner. Terrible fast food that was way overpriced is what you get in an amusement park and this was the same. I remember looking for a table to sit at while my wife was buying the food. I found many of the tables in the covered picnic area heaped with trash. They were trash cans all around the picnic area and they were not full. But people had chosen to eat and then just leave their trash on the table instead of cleaning up after themselves. I found that very sad and at first thought of it as inconsiderate but had to back off of that judgment and leave it outside.
I watched so many people walk through garbage literally, stepping gingerly so that they don't get any of it on them and going the long way around something to get to the door so that they don't have to even get close to it. Instead of just picking it up and putting it in the garbage can.
In Scouting one of the things they teach is "leave no trace". It's a mindset when you are out and about, especially out in natural areas or the woods, to do your thing and have fun but when done try to leave no trace of ever having been there. I took that to heart and have tried to do that in my daily life. It goes along with emptying myself so that God can fill me with his presence, but that's a different subject.
I know that in the end nobody will really know what I did. I gravitate towards those sorts of activities. And I hope that I leave the world a little bit better so the next person can take it and run with it.
