Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
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?”
The point of the fish story is merely that the most
obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and
talk about.
Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude -
but the fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence,
banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance.
The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what
"day in day out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American
life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches.
One such part involves
boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know
all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adult day,
and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar,
college-graduates job.
and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired
and somewhat stressed
and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour,
and then hit the sack early
because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember
there's no food at home.
you haven't had time to shop this week because it was challenging job, and so now
after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket
it's the end of a work day and the traffic is apt to be:
very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should
and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded
because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try
to squeeze in some grocery shopping.
But you can't just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge,
over-lit stores confusing ailes to find the stuff you want
and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried
people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony),
and eventually
you get all your supper supplies,
except now it turns out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though
it's the end of the day rush.
so the checkout line is incredibly long which is stupid and infuriating.
But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working
the register,
who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaningless surpasse the
imagination of
any of us here at a prestigious college.
Anyway you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for
your food,
And then get told “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voices of death,
and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in
your cart
with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way
out through the crowded, pumpy, littery parking lot,
and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive,
rush hour traffic,
et cetera, et cetera. Everyone here has done this, of course.
But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine,
day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary,
annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides.
But that is not the point. The point is that petty,
frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing
is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams in crowded aisles and long checkout
lines give me time to think,
and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think
and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable
every time I have to shop. Because my default setting is the
certainty that situations like this are really all about me.
about my hungriness and my fatigue
and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem
for all the world like everybody else is in my way.
And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them
and how stupid
cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line,
or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones
in the middle of the line.
And look at how deeply personally unfair this is.
If I choose to think this way in the store and on the freeway
fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic
that it doesn't have to be a choice..
It is my natural default setting. It's the automatic way
that I experienced the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life
when I'm operating on the automatic unconscious belief
That I am the center of the world and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should
determine the world’s priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there's totally different ways to think about
these kinds of situations.
In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way,
it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's has been in horrible
auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has
all but
ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood
that veryone else in the supermarket’s checkout line just as bored and frustrated
as I am, and that some of these people probably have much harder,
more tedious or painful lives than I do.
Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you're
supposed to think this way,
or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it.
Because it's hard. It takes will and effort,
and if you are like me, some days won't be able to do it,
or you just flat out won’t want to. But most days
if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently
at this fat, dead-eyed, over made up lady who just screamed
at her kid in the checkout line.Maybe
she's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holding the hand of
a husband who is dying of
bone cancer. Or maybe this very ladies is the low-wage clerk at
the motor vehicles department who just yesterday helped your spouse
resolve a horrific, infuriating, red tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.
Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not
impossible. It just depends what you want to consider.
If you're automatically sure that you know
what reality is, who and what is really important,
and you are operating on your default setting,
then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable.
But if you really learn how to think, how to pay attention
then you will know there are 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 made the stars: love, fellowship,
the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true.
The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide
how you’re gonna try to see it. This, I submit,
is the freedom of real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted.
You get to consciously decide
what has meaning and what doesn't.
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.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly
inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound.
What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth,
with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away.
You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just
dismiss it as some finger-wagging Doctor Laura sermon.
None of this stuff is really about morality or religion
or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
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 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.”