A Drop in the Bucket 一滴水的聯想

As Ping's cousin drove us home from a family dinner last night, the wind and rain lashed the everything in its path. Trees whipped from side to side, bits of broken branches flying off to who knows where. Water washed down streets and through  intersections, adding a slew of new tributaries to the Danshui River (淡水河).

When Mark got home, he checked the barometer. This is the lowest setting we've seen yet.

At 10:22 PM, the authorities made it official: schools and businesses will be closed. We're having a typhoon!

Not much later, Ping announced: "We have water in the utility room."



How much? Not much. A swipe of the sponge was enough to wipe it up, but it was water, nonetheless.

A trapdoor in the utility room ceiling opens onto a "roof" at the base of a vertical shaft that's open to the sky. The roof and its trapdoor were completely rebuilt just before we moved in, so the seals are all brand new--or they were, about a year ago. Even with all the rain we got last winter, nothing came through.

We stood and watched one drop fall into the big blue bucket we placed on the wet spot. We waited. Another drop fell. They were few and far between. Mark got on the step stool and looked closely, waiting until another drop fell. He ran a finger up by the seal around the trapdoor. Dry. He waited until another drop fell into the bucket below. A pinhole at the end of one seal allows one drop through at a time, and only when it rains this hard and water collects in some particular place on the roof.

This morning, despite the continuously intensifying storm, there was no more water in the bucket than there was on the floor the night before. A drop. A long delay. Another drop.

Imagine that you are a single droplet of water in a typhoon. You evaporated from someplace thousands of miles away, were whisked away and thrashed about until you fell to this particular spot on this particular roof and worked your way down to collect at the end of the seal in this particular room. At exactly the right moment, you dropped into the bucket.

Okay, so it's kind of a crummy metaphor ("Wait. Are you saying my whole purpose is to annoy someone and then get wiped up and squeezed down the drain?") but the Zen koan "every snowflake falls in its perfect place" applies here. We may not know exactly what our effect will be as we jostle with everyone else on this planet, but every drop in the bucket counts. Where we end up is no mistake.

Acting together, even a relatively small number of us share the awesome power of a typhoon.