"This Is Water"
At a commencement speech years ago, the author David Foster Wallace recounted a story of two young fishes who meet a couple of older fish as they’re swimming along. One of the older fish greets the young fish and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” The boys continue swimming and a short while later, one of them asks, “What the hell is water?”
What the hell is water?
Of course, they’d ask that question. They’d been raised in water and never had cause to think about it. It was so obvious as to not be noticeable.
But they’d also never thought otherwise. They’d never thought to understand or question what was, in fact, their reality.
The point of the story was one of awareness. But Wallace’s real point was that the young fish’s perceptions and behaviors were analogous to so much of our human existence.
Many of us (possibly all of us in different ways and at different times) operate in a sort of default mode, going through our routines, reacting in specific ways and interpreting events in a defined fashion, without consideration of what we actually value and want. This is our reality and what we consider to be the normal course of things. We don’t acknowledge or even comprehend what our options are.
The truth is, though, that these are, in fact, choices. And the truth of our existence, essentially what we learn as we get older, is that we have choices.
How we perceive situations. How we view events. How we react to people.
All of this is down to us - that responsibility lies with us. We can choose to change or we can choose not to. But again, that’s a choice. We make that choice.
This is the real value of our education and our experiences, be it at school, at college, at work or in life. What we grapple with and live with are our choices. This is our “water”.
