This Is Water
This book is a powerful reminder of compassion, awareness, and attention.
Well, it’s not an ordinary book. It’s a transcript of the commencement speech that David Foster Wallace gave in 2005 at Kenyon College. I love coming back to it again and again: every time the magic happens and I see something new and important.
Below are my favorite quotes. It’s almost the entire book. Don’t read them. Better listen or read the whole thing yourself. And maybe like me, return to it from time to time, for a powerful reminder about compassion, awareness, and attention.
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
The immediate point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
The really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get (…) isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.
… to be just a little less arrogant, to have some “critical awareness” about myself and my certainties… because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.
Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract thinking instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on in front of me. Instead of paying attention to what’s going on inside me.
… it’s extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your head.
“Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
Think of the old cliché about the mind being “an excellent servant but a terrible master”.
The real, no-shit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.
(…) petty, frustrating crap is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. (…) it’s the automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrated, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.
If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important - if you want to operate on your default setting - then you, like me, probably will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. But if you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars - compassion, love and subsurface unity of all things. The only thing that’s capital-T true is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted: you get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. (…) pretty much anything you worship will eat you alive.
If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough.
Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.
Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need even more power over others to keep that fear at bay.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. they are default settings.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being taught how to think.
The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the “rat race” - the constant, gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It’s about the real value of a real education, which has nothing to do with grades or degrees and everything to do with simple awareness, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: “This is water.”
It is unimaginably hard to do this - to live consciously, adultly, day in and day out.