the bucket

[honeydumplin]

A few years ago on a job site that I'd been working on,
I'd placed an old plastic five gallon bucket nearby.
The bucket was a collection point for all of the unwanted
pieces of small trash, and leftover material accumulated
during the course of the day. After work, grinding dust
and dirt that had been tracked in was swept and placed
inside this bucket.

Well, one day I came in to discovered that not only
had someone taken "my" bucket, but they'd
dumped out the contents in a pile there on the floor.
I was furious. How could someone come and steal
one of the only things that was sitting around.

This really seemed to disturb me. I guess I thought
that whoever had taken the bucket would suddenly
return it, because along with the original pile of stuff,
I slowly began to add to it, and make the pile bigger with
each passing day.

Then, as time went on, I brought in another bucket and
started locking it up at the end of each day. It was around
then that I gradually began to realize something that hadn't
crossed my mind before. I'd taken the original bucket
from another job site that I'd worked on previously. If I
really looked at the situation honestly, maybe I'd actually
"stolen" the first bucket from someone who was using it,
or saving it for some other purpose.

The bucket hadn't changed ownership. It was never
mine to begin with. I was simply using it, and the next
person who took it; well, maybe he needed to use it too.

All of that anger and resentment that was directed
at no one in particular, concerning something that wasn't
even mine to begin with, seems so miniscule. But it is
the periods of minor growth just such as that, that allow
me not to take myself so seriousy, and to realize how
grateful I am to not be a practicing drunk anymore.