The Scrap Heap

I collect stuff, all kinds of stuff. Mostly bits of paper with little notes on them, often undecipherable, of things I’ve heard at meetings or ideas that have come to me on the subway or in a car or walking down the street, that I had to write down on whatever was available: a matchbook cover, an old business card, a piece of newspaper, the back of a theater program. My bureau is covered with them, stretching back quite a number of years. And there are other things, too, like pens, small stones, and pocketknives. It’s my own personal scrap heap. 

I also have an emotional scrap heap—one where I toss old relationships and uncomfortable feelings. I’ve been doing that for years, too. It’s not nearly as visible as my other collection, which my wife has learned not to upset when she cleans my bureau and my desk top, but it’s just as tangible, creating a kind of emotional force-field around me that keeps other people away.

Every so often, however, the two scrap heaps combine in a way that is beneficial for my sobriety and for my spiritual life.

Not too long ago, I was at an AA meeting and heard something, as I often do, that struck a chord with me. A woman was sharing about some of the personal relationships in her life and, with the advent of sobriety, how she had been able to move from indifference to forgiveness with many of the people she knew. I don’t remember much more of what she said, as I was busy rifling through my pockets to find a scrap of paper and a pen. On the very edge of an envelope I found stuffed into my coat, I wrote “indifference vs. forgiveness.”

This scrap ultimately went onto the heap with the rest of the stuff collected in the interim, but I kept taking it off the pile and moving it to a clear area on my bureau, a kind of holding pen where I put things I’m still mulling over.

Looking at the scrap of paper every so often, I kept thinking about my own relationships and the other scrap heap where any number of unresolved personal connections were piled up. I realized that I too, had been mistaking indifference for forgiveness, assuming that if a difficult relationship was simply inactive, in other words, wasn’t causing me any immediate pain, then everything was okay. But there was far more that could be done in the relationship than I was willing to do, and that was to truly forgive.

Thinking about the word “indifference,” I realized it characterizes a lot of how I deal with other people in the world. It is neatly summed up in AA literature in the text of Step Ten: “Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.” In the book Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, where it says: “Not many people can truthfully assert that they love everybody. Most of us must admit that we have loved but a few; that we have been quite indifferent to the many so long as none of them gave us trouble; and as for the remainder—well, we have really disliked or hated them.”

The text continues on to say, “Although these attitudes are common enough, we AAs find that we need something much better in order to keep our balance. We can’t stand it if we hate deeply. The idea that we can be possessively loving of a few, can ignore the many, and can continue to fear or hate anybody, has to be abandoned, if only a little at a time.”

That scrap of paper was an awakening of sorts, a call to mobilization; a recognition that it was time to dig into my emotional scrap heap to unearth any lingering resentments or twisted relationships that may have been lying on the pile, dormant yet unforgiven.

The more visible scrap heap of paper bits, envelope corners and old movie tickets could remain, however, much to my wife’s chagrin.