This is water

Day 319 / 365

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?”

This was the beginning of the speech that David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College back in 2005.

The point of the fish story is that the most important realities of life are often the hardest to notice and talk about. The fishes have been surrounded by water their whole lives, yet they failed to notice it.

There are so many things that are true and prevalent about our lives and our thinking, yet we rarely think about them. David talks about these as being our “Default Settings”. For instance, our self-centeredness. How we think that we are the most important person in the world, the center of the universe. Well adjusted people are those who can be alert of their default settings and even adjust them.

But the world around us will not encourage us to sway away from the default settings. Because it is filled with other beings who run on those same settings. The freedom of real education is to be able to decide consciously what is right and what’s not. To choose what to believe in and what to worship.

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 post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — When the going gets tough