A few years back, I started to develop this habit. I ride my bike a lot, usually in urban settings. I use it to commute most days. For some reason, I started stopping to pick up coins when I rode past them on the street. They're usually pretty easy to spot; they glint up from the road in a way that catches the eye. Like most people, I used to ride past them. But one day - and I can't remember where I was or what was on my mind - I guess I felt like it's silly to ride past free money, or something. I felt a kind of romantic attachment to these little coins. I know that when I was on my big bike ride last summer I made a point of stopping to pick up just about every coin I rode past. Sometimes it was nice and gave me a reason to take a break and get off the bike for a second. Anyway, you learn some things when you start doing this, one of which is that there are an awful lot of coins on the ground. Once you start looking for them, the roads are littered with coins. That picture I posted is all just coins that I picked up yesterday, just riding around town. (If you have a good eye, you'll notice that one of them isn't even American currency).
I can't honestly say there's any rational reason that I pick up these coins. It certainly isn't worth my time monetarily. I don't really collect them, per se - I thought about it but I just wasn't really called or motivated to do that. Most of the time they go in my piggy bank and I probably wind up giving them to the bank. I do like looking at them. I like the look they get after getting run over, all scarred and pitted. I like the sense that I get of cleaning things up, of somehow making things more efficient. But basically I just do it just because.
If I were in an 80s movie, maybe being played by River Phoenix, we would call this a "quirk". I would be quirky. And we like that sort of thing. We like quirks in people. I basically do this coin thing because nobody else does, and because it doesn't make any sense. I think somehow it's important to us as people to stand out, to be individual. It makes me happy that people don't understand why I pick up the coins. Maybe it reminds us of our humanity. Not to overdo it, but I think it reminds us of the essentially absurd nature of being a human being; that, at some level, nothing we do really makes a ton of sense. I get strange looks sometimes from people when I stop, pull over, and pick up a penny. I can see them thinking "did that guy drop that penny? is it special somehow?". Well, no, and no. I'm just quirky like that, I guess.