THIS IS WATER By David Foster Wallace
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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 eventually
One of them looks over at the other and goes
What the hell is water?
The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious
Important realities are often the ones that are hardest
To see and talk about
Stated as an english sentence of course is just a banal platitude
But the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence
Banal platitudes can have a life or death importance
The plain fact is that you graduating seniors Do not yet have any clue What day in day out
really means There happen to be whole large parts of adult
American life That nobody talks about in commencement speeches
One such part involves boredom routine and petty frustration
The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about
By way of example let's say it's an average adult day
And you get up in the morning Go to your challenging white collar college
graduate job
And you work hard for eight or ten hours And at the end of the day you're tired and
somewhat stressed And all you want is to go home and have a
good supper And maybe unwind for an hour and then hit
the sack early Because of course you have to get up the next
day and do it all again But then you remember there's no food at home
You haven't had time to shop this week because of your challenging job
And so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket
It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be very bad
So getting to the store takes way longer than it should
And when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded
Because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs
Also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping But you can't just get in and quickly out
You have to wander all over the huge over lit store's confusing aisles
To find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart
Through all these other tired hurried people with carts
Et cetera et cetera cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony
And eventually you get all your supper supplies Except now it turns out there aren't enough
check-out lanes open Even though it's the end of the day rush
So the checkout line is incredibly long which is stupid and infuriating
But you can't take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register
Who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness
Surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college
But anyway you finally get to the checkout line's front
And you pay for your food and you get told to Have a nice day
In a voice that is the absolute voice of death Then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic
bags of groceries In your cart with the one crazy wheel that
pulls maddeningly to the left All the way out through the crowded bumpy
littery parking lot And then you have to drive all the way home
through Slow heavy SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic
et cetera et cetera Everyone here has done this of course
But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates actual life routine
Day after week after month after year But it will be
And many more dreary annoying seemingly meaningless routines besides
But that is not the point The point is that petty frustrating crap like
this Is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna
come in Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles
and long checkout lines Give me time to think and if I don't make
a conscious decision About how to think and what to pay attention
to I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time
I have to shop Because my natural default setting is the
certainty That situations like this are really all about
me About my hungriness and my fatigue and my
desire to just get home And it's going to seem for all the world like
everybody else is just in my way And who are all these people in my way?
And look at how repulsive most of them are And how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed
And nonhuman they seem in the checkout line Or at how annoying and rude it is that people
Are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line
And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway
Fine lots of us do Except thinking this way tends to be so easy
and automatic That it doesn't have to be a choice
It is my natural default setting It's the automatic way that I experience
The boring frustrating 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 The thing is that of course there are totally
different ways To think about these kinds of situations
In this traffic all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way
It's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's
Have been in horrible auto accidents in the past
And now find driving so terrifying that their therapist
Has all but ordered them to get a huge heavy SUV
So they can feel safe enough to drive Or I can choose to force myself to consider
the likelihood That everyone else in the supermarkets checkout
line Is just as bored and frustrated as I am
And that some of these people probably have much harder
More tedious and painful lives than I do Again please don't think that I'm giving you
moral advice Or that I'm saying you are supposed to think
this way Or that anyone expects you to just automatically
do it Because it's hard
It takes will and effort and if you are like me
Some days you won't be able to do it Or you just flat out won't want to
But most days if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice
You can choose to look differently At this fat dead eyed over made up lady
Who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line
Maybe she's not usually like this Maybe she's been up three straight nights
holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer
Or maybe this very lady is the low wage clerk At the motor vehicle department who just yesterday
Helped your spouse resolve a horrific infuriating Red tape problem through some small act of
bureaucratic kindness Of course none of this is likely but it's
also not impossible It just depends what you what to consider
If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is
And you are operating on your default setting Then you like me probably won't consider possibilities
That aren't annoying and miserable But if you really learn how to think how to
pay attention Then you will know there are 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 made the
stars Love fellowship the mystical oneness of all
things deep down Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily
true The only thing that's capital T True
Is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it
This I submit is the freedom of a real education Of learning how to be well adjusted
You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't
That is real freedom that is being educated And understanding 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
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy
Or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech
Is supposed to sound What it is as far as I can see is the capital
T Truth With a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped
away You are of course free to think of it whatever
you wish But please don't just dismiss it as just some
Finger wagging Doctor Laura sermon None of this stuff is really about morality
or religion or dogma Or big fancy questions of life after death
The capital T Truth is about life before death It is about the real value of a real education
Which has almost nothing to do with knowledge And everything to do with simple awareness
Awareness of what is so real and essential So hidden in plain sight all around us all
the time that we have to keep reminding ourselves over
and over This is water
This is water