This is Water
May 12th, 2024 (9 months ago) • 5 minutes
tl;dr The fish are always surrounded by water. So they never think about it. But they should because they're always looking at things through the water and it affects everything about how they perceive the world.
It’s easy to become obsessed with a goal or a person or a job or a dream – a lot of his work is about obsession – but we should also be aware of how these obsessions can surround us, and even drown us.
This morning I listened to David Foster Wallace's commencement speech to the graduating class of Kenyon College. This was back in 2005, but little did he know that his words would resonate with us in 2024.
3 takeaways:
- Be aware of arrogance
the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience
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blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.
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The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little 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.
Our personal point of view is not the only one. It's often scoped by our upbringing, surrounding, and experiences. We should be aware of this and be open to other perspectives. Default from I'm always right to I'm maybe right.
Allowing our own thoughts to be wrong is a sign of growth. It forces us to question our baseline and experience a richer world.
- Rejecting your default
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 what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot 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.”
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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 centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.
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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.
Adult life is full of boredom, routine and petty frustration. The point is to choose how to react to this. You are not the only that is feeling this, everybody else is just going through as hard as you.
Don't assume you are the center, instead allow your compassion and empathy to develop your world view. Choose to look at things differently even though it's hard.
- Finding freedom
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.
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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.
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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.
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."
Ignore your default. True freedom is found in choosing how to think and what to think about.