Personal essays
Adding up individual drops
Leaky faucet
My bathroom sink has a slow drip.
It’s slow enough that I can ignore it yet constant enough that I keep meaning to do something about it.
Here’s the thing about slow drips - they add up.
I remember putting a bucket under a slow drip in a bathtub years ago. This drip that didn’t seem to be leaking much water filled up the bucket overnight.
These drops of water - these things you brush away or shake off or just leave when you get a little on you - they add up.
And yet, when you collect these nothings into a stream they can cut through rock. Over time they erode even the strongest of materials.
So I know I should fix the drip.
Fix it
Fixing a drip like this can cost anywhere from fifty cents to hundreds of dollars.
With the right tools and a little effort, I can replace the washer in the dripping sink for less than a dollar.
It always amazes me that this little piece of nothing is what’s causing the issue.
Of course, with different tools, and some more effort, I can replace the faucet for probably sixty dollars.
I will admit that in the past I’ve sometimes done one and sometimes done the other. In most cases I’ve replaced the washer but every once in a while I convince myself that I probably should replace the whole faucet.
The most expensive alternative is to hire someone to come in and do the work for you. I almost had to do that once when a fixture was so rusted underneath that I didn’t think I could remove the old faucet.
Stubbornness and not wanting to spend the money kept me at it and probably cost me more in billable hours than calling a plumber would have cost.
There’s something satisfying about repairing something yourself. I’m not handy so I mostly hire people - but this is a washer. I should be able to do that.
Anniversaries
Anyway, I was talking about drips and buckets and streams.
Yesterday was five years since I sent out the first issue of this newsletter.
Today is the two-hundred-sixty-second Tuesday, whether home or traveling, that I’ve sat down to write an essay.
Drip.
Friday will be the hundred-sixth time I’ve headed upstairs to record a podcast. Two years or recording the newsletter essay from roughly three years earlier.
It’s interesting (to me) that I often don’t understand all I meant when I wrote the essay until three years later when I record it.
Anniversaries are a funny thing.
When Kim was alive, our wedding anniversary was a time when others looked back and talked about the things we had been through. They talked about our wedding day. Kim and I looked at the year ahead and think of what we wanted to do or where we wanted to go.
We never looked at each other and said, “twenty, I guess that’s enough.”
And yet, with this newsletter, each year on the anniversary I stop and think, “should I continue?”
And on we go
I spend two to three hours writing the essay and gathering the links.
Drip.
Gathering the links has meant that I have to continue reading things online even when there are days (weeks? months?) when I’d prefer to hide from it all.
Writing has meant that I’ve had to confront things that I’m thinking that I didn’t know that I was thinking. I often have a prompt or a theme to begin with and my weekly exploration takes me in directions I never thought it would.
And so, each year I think, “maybe that’s enough.”
The two to three hours of the newsletter and one to two hours of the podcast add up.
The bucket I filled in the first year of newsletter was the equivalent of three to four weeks of work. The essays could have filled two books.
Now that I’m five years in, the posts have formed a shallow stream.
It’s slow moving but constant. If nothing else, it changes me.
This year when I think of stopping, the world around me tells me not to.
There is a whole apparatus that would like to stop the slow but constant drips from people like me.
Drips from people like you.
They aren’t going to use washers. They’re looking to replace faucets. They’re calling plumbers to have the old rusty, frozen in place, ones of us removed.
Until then, I will continue to drip.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 262. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe