A Drop in the Bucket

Friday morning at 3:30AM, I turned in my “Final Draft” of my senior thesis. It wasn’t perfect. As I crawled into bed, 10 minutes after pressing send, I thought of at least 5 things I should have fixed. But as I scrolled through section after section, as I finalized my bibliography, as I read over the details- I felt myself swell with pride. I had done it! I had started a club at a local school and it seemed to have made an impact on the kids I worked with. I started figuring out how to write a real research paper, learning how to write literary reviews and use qualitative research methods- even if the big words scared me. And I wrote a lot of pages of academic writing. My draft wasn’t perfect, but that didn’t take away the satisfaction I felt at completing such a feat.

I’ve spent of a lot of this year being “stressed” about my thesis. There was uncertainty first semester about what school I would work with. There was stress when I panicked at not knowing what a literature review was, much less how to write one. There was a comically pathetic day when I started crying because I couldn’t get the car out of the parking lot to make it to a club meeting. Sometimes, most times, my greatest source of stress was the fact it was just “looming.” Short papers for classes are usually a one and done sort of thing, but writing this was a process. Which meant that if I was indulging in Netflix or out with my friend, there was always a voice in my back of my head saying, “Shouldn’t you be working?”

A couple weeks ago, just as I was starting to wrap everything up, my thesis advisor said something to me that stuck- “This is just a drop in the bucket.” Here my thesis had been this huge, hovering cloud of stress to me,when in reality, it was just like she said, a drop in the bucket.

How often do we do that? Take something small and temporary: a paper, an argument with a friend, a disappointment- and turn it into something way bigger than it actually is. This happens all the time, shortchanging us from enjoying the little things in life and the peace of being present, by consuming us in the pressure to finish one thing, then another.

Even college, in the end, is just a drop in the bucket. Whether you’ve had the best four years of your life- or the worst (and most realistically, something in the middle)- it is a just a drop (or maybe a few). Right now, college feels like everything, because this is all we know so far- but there are so many more things to come. I’m excited for the drops that will join my bucket in the future- for visiting new countries, for when I watch my career take off in directions I don’t imagine, for new communities I’ll create in new cities, with new people. I’m excited for the unknowns in the way farther future- marriage, family, career changes, travels. I’m excited for watching this metaphorical bucket overflow, not from singular events, but from a life lived in joy.