This is Water

Hey everyone,

So, I'm home right now. Things have been pretty great the last few days. The drive wasn't so bad cause I had the Munchkin with me. We sang songs, listened to phat tunes, and tried (and eventually gave up trying) to listen to Twilight.

When I got home Bean freaked out so much...it was really cute. She threw herself on the floor and made sounds almost like she was crying. Then she got so excited she started to sneeze.

My brothers came over and we sat around and talked for a while. I sometimes forget how good it is to talk to them.

I got to meet the Munchkin's boyfriend (he was over at our place to see her within an hour (he was really suffering the few days she was gone)). He seems like a really good guy. I can tell he's crazy about my sister and that he's trying his hardest to make her happy....so I'm cool with him. Maybe I should be more protective, but I've never been that sort of big brother; I really trust the Munchkin's judgment. Anyone she likes is cool with me.

Lately I've been thinking about a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace. The speech was given in 2005 or 2006. A year or so ago some publisher took the speech and made a book out of it (probably to capitalize on the interest generated by his death). The book you can find the speech in is called This is Water.

Here is the full speech if you'd like to read it: This is Water (I really recommend reading it if you have the time, it's not that long really).

Anyway, the speech starts off with a story. The story goes like this:

"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?"

He then goes on to say "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."

Wallace then argues that an education helps us to recognize the water. An education helps us to see new ways of viewing the world that we aren't naturally disposed to, and then it helps us to decide which ones have merit and which ones do not. As we do this we learn what is meaningful.

He then goes on to say (and this is just the last few paragraphs of the speech)

"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. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else 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, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your 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 grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

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 Dr 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."