https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKYJVV7HuZw
A few months ago, I read a post by Kate Arends on Wit & Delight that referenced the commencement speech by David Foster Wallace called “This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.” I watched it and loved it and saved it to the running draft email to myself with the subject line ‘Things that are great’. Because it is great.
Have you heard it before? It’s a commencement speech given at Kenyon College in 2005. The message – that we have the choice of perspective that can guard us against the mundane, everyday annoyances of the world – often comes flooding back to me. How about that for a pun?!
Have you watched it yet? It’s nine minutes and worth every second.
Okay, we’ll assume you’ve watched it now. For the sake of this story. But seriously, you should watch it.
Ten days each month, I make the trek to the office where I do marketing and online editing for a wedding magazine and an interiors magazine. I enjoy my work and the people I do it with immensely, but it involves a commute that I find draining. The office recently moved and the trek now involves a half hour train ride, followed by a twenty minute cycle, followed by a twenty minute walk. Somehow, since the office moved farther from my house on the north side of Dublin just before Christmas, that trek has almost always involved either rain or wind or often both rain and wind. And so many potholes and so much swan poop.
Unlike the references in David Foster Wallace’s address, which mostly involve the potential annoyances people provide in our day to day lives, the annoyances I face on those ten days are almost always natural. Some days I feel like I physically can’t keep cycling or walking against the wind or into the rain. Sometimes I just don’t want to keep dodging swan poop on the sidewalk and weaving in and out of people walking my way (did you know in Dublin there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to which side of the sidewalk you walk on? It’s a constant and exhausting game of chicken).
But I have taken to reminding myself: This is water. This is it. This is all we get. The every day is most of it. And my positive attitude against wind and rain and potholes and swan poop is my choice.
The irony hit me only this week as I was reciting this is water, this is water, on my way home after a long day, getting stung in the face with droplets of windy Dublin water.
***
If you really learn how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have 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 lit the stars. With love, fellowship, the mystical one-ness of all things deep down.
You get to consciously decide what has meaning, and what doesn’t. That is real freedom.
The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.
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.
**
5 Comments
its David foster Wallace – you may wish to fix! 🙂
Such a good reminder and one I humbly admit to needing more often than not. And particularly poignant given the circumstances of his death.
I have followed your blog for a while and really enjoy it.
No, I hadn’t seen it, and thank you for bringing it to my attention! Life before death…such an interesting concept. In the current era of ‘first world problems’, it takes effort to step outside the bubble of narcissism, and look at the world with engaged, interested, and above all, grateful eyes. Not easy every day, and downright impossible on others, but something to think about, for sure.
I’m just curious where and to you are commuting, it seems to be really crappy connection. I know Dublin doesn’t have the best public transport map…
I actually started embracing the water because of commuting as well. Even though my previous office wasn’t that far, but getting there took me 40 min one way walk, for Polish standards, it’s a long walk. I could cycle and I did for some time, but it stressed me, I was annoyed, so I started walking. To deal with it I started listening to audiobooks and podcasts, I took photos for my instagram.
Now we are driving to work, or I take a bus. Damn I miss even those rainy, windy days. I spent outdoors 1 1/2 hour a day, now only a few minutes. I’m waiting for brighter evenings to incorporate walks or jogging. I still try to embrace my current commute, but sometimes our water is better than we think.
My commute on days I go into the office is from Bayside to Harold’s Cross. It’s just an awkward way to cross the city! I take the dart, then a public bike to the canal, then walk. It’s a bit of a triathlon 😉 I so enjoy the cycling across the city, but the wind and rain make it hard sometimes!