On the first day of the year, I re-read David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water. This essay was first delivered as a commencement speech (at Kenyon College in 2005) and later stretched out into book form. I have lost track of how many times I have read the book or listened to its words.
This is from the opening:
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?”
David Foster Wallace, This Is Water, page 3.
Perhaps you smile knowingly, then catch yourself and stop — there is no sense making fun of fish! More parable than joke, this is not about fish or water — nor fish improbably talking to each other. However, those fish do introduce the situation quite well.
There is an uneasy claim here and once you see it, you find it difficult to disbelieve: There are things that are important and all around us — and we either do not see them or we do not understand.
You cannot help but be the main character in the story that you experience. Everything you see, you see from your perspective. As you are reading this, it is you observing the words, doing the reading, thinking about them, invariably in the context of everything else that you are.
This obvious self-centeredness informs, where your attention goes and what you are biased for and against. Whether by habit or random chance, your default behaviors further contribute to and shape your experience.
Your picture of reality is necessarily always a partial one. However, the autopilot of your default actions deny you the chance of effecting real changes to the partiality of your view.
You can disrupt that flow with a few well-placed questions or, really, by making a deliberate choice: how to think about a situation, what perspectives to consider. For this, you need to remember that you have that choice. Of course, now that we mention it, it seems so obvious. That is the point though, is it not?
Some things are so obvious, they are really easy to miss.