david foster wallace - this is water

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. 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-graduate 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 of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the 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. And the store is hideously fluorescently lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts. Eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out 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 meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college. You finally get to the checkout’s front line, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. 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, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams, and 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 natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me; about my hunger, and my fatigue and my desire to just get home. And it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people who are in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and non-human they seem in the checkout line. Or how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on a cell phone in the checkout line. And look how deeply personally unfair this is. Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious, liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time at the end of the day in traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and hummers and v12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish 40 gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that patriotic or religious bumper stickers, always seem to be on the biggest, most disgusting vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for probably screwing up the climate, and for how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society. If I choose to think this way in a 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 is the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life, when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities. The thing is of course that there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of the people in SUVs have been auto accidents at some time, and now find driving do terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to buy the biggest, heaviest SUV so that they feel safe enough to drive. Or that the hummer who just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am. It is actually I that is in his way. Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line are just as bored and frustrated as I am. And that some of these people have more painful or tedious lives than I do. 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 who’s been holding the hand of her husband who’s dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady 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 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 and who and what is really important, if you want to operate under the default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. 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 lit the stars; love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.