Lighter Than We Think

It has been almost two years since I started running my lab on my own. Along with the freedom came small responsibilities I had never thought much about before, like keeping a steady supply of water for coffee and tea.

There are no convenience stores right next to my building. The campus co-op is the closest option, but it follows the academic calendar and closes more often than expected, sometimes without notice. Over time, buying two-liter bottles of water became a small logistical task woven into my routine.

I developed a simple rule: buy heavy things—especially two-liter bottles of water—only from the closest possible place.

Part of this came from practicality. I have a mild contact allergy, so carrying heavy bottles against my arm can irritate my skin. Carrying them by hand avoids that, though the weight then shifts to my wrist. Over time, it felt reasonable to treat large bottles of water as something that should only be purchased from the nearest store.

For nearly two years, I followed this rule without questioning it.

One day, the co-op was closed again. There had been no announcement. I had only one bottle of water left in the lab, and my usual buffer was four.

The next day, after Pilates, I stopped by a convenience store near the studio to buy a sandwich for lunch. The store was much farther from the lab than anywhere I would normally consider buying anything heavy. They sold bottled water, of course. I hesitated for a moment, then decided to buy a bottle anyway and carry it to the lab.

It turned out to be surprisingly light.

I remember feeling mildly confused. For years, a two-liter bottle of water had lived in my mind as something heavy, inconvenient, and best avoided whenever possible. Yet I walked to the lab with it in my hand and felt… fine. The next day, I bought another one. It felt normal.

Somewhere along the way, the rule had stopped matching reality.

This small realization reminded me of something I once read in a high school magazine. A farmer had discovered a large rock in his field. It was in the way, but removing it seemed like an enormous task, so he left it there for a long time. Eventually, he set aside a day to dig it out. After digging for a while, he realized the rock was shaped like a flat plate. From the surface it had looked massive, but once he dug just a little deeper, it came out much more easily than he had imagined.

I held onto that story for years as a personal maxim, though it remained mostly abstract—an idea about effort, hesitation, and the things we postpone.

Until recently, it was just a story.

Carrying that bottle of water back to the lab, I suddenly understood it in a physical way. Over two years, the weight of a two-liter bottle had quietly grown in my imagination. The rule I had made to protect myself had stayed in place long after the conditions that created it had changed.

The bottle was never the problem. The assumption was.

It made me wonder how many things in life sit quietly in the corner of our routines, labeled as heavy, difficult, or inconvenient simply because we have not tried lifting them in a while.

There may be more rocks in the field than we realize.
Many of them, perhaps, are flatter than they appear.