What is your daily routine? What do you think about on your way to work or school? Are you even thinking at all?
It seems to many of us, that during our lives we are always in this “automatic” mindset. Most of the time, we aren’t even choosing how to think about every situation. Instead, we are unconsciously viewing ourselves as the center of every situation that is handed to us.
Think about the traffic on your way to work, or the time you missed the bus. In those moments, you were probably aggravated, frustrated, and thought “why is this happening to me?” As if the world and everything around you was only focused on you. What if there was traffic because someone got in an accident, or someone cut you off because they were in a hurry to the hospital? In many of these “day in, and day out” situations, we are experiencing the world through this automatic mindset. We limit ourselves from thinking that just maybe, most of the events that upset us actually have nothing to do with us. Instead, by opening our horizons and widening our perspectives, we can gain a different way of thinking.
David Foster Wallace gave a famous commencement speech titled “This Is Water” for the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. Many of us know that graduation speeches are easily forgotten. However, it has been 17 years since David’s speech and it is still remembered and honored. Why is his speech so famous?
David’s speech was unlike many of the graduation speeches that we have heard in the past. Instead of wishing the graduate class good luck with their future endeavors or trying to teach them something new, David provided a different perspective for the current lives that the students already live. David’s speech targets the parts of adult American life that no one addresses in commencement speeches. The “day in, day out” routines that are boring and often result in petty frustration.
Instead of experiencing the world with this easy and automatic setting, David tries to create a conscious awareness of the events around us and give us the choice to think freely.
Here are a few famous quotes from David Foster Wallace’s speech “This Is Water.” I hope that reading through his quotes will allow you to gain further insight, awareness, and a sense of reality. Live in the moment, and notice the way you think about and see the world around you.
1. "Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you."
2. "The most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about."
3. "We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?"
4. "The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day."
5. "Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever ore power over others to keep the fear at bay. "
6. "Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out."
7. "True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world."
8. "It did what all ads are supposed to do: create an anxiety relievable by purchase."
9. "If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth."
10 ."Logical validity is not a guarantee of truth."
11. "You have decided being scared is caused mostly by thinking."
12. "What the really great artists do is they’re entirely themselves. They’re entirely themselves, they’ve got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it’s authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings."
13. "Whatever you get paid attention for is never what you think is most important about yourself."
14. "Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing."
15. "Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you."
16. "The desire for perfect release and the real-world impossibility of perfect, whenever-you-want-it release had together produced a tension they could no longer stand."
17. "Learning how to think" really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
18. "Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else."
19. "It’s probably hard to feel any sort of Romantic spiritual connection to nature when you have to make your living from it."
20. "On one level, we all know this stuff already — it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness."
21. "The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness."
22. "It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.” It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out."
23. “I wish you way more than luck.”
