In a memorable graduation speech, the writer David Foster Wallace explained the real purpose of a liberal arts education. It is not to download literary and historical data into your brain, but to teach you something much more fundamental: to give you the power to choose what you want to think about at every moment.
You can go through life being reactive to life’s daily routines. In traffic, you will ache for cars to move faster. In the supermarket, you will be desperate for the checkout lines to clear up. At work, you will distract yourself with anything to make time pass faster.
Some people live their entire lives this way. They do whatever they can to skip the boring and difficult parts. Or they complain, constantly nostalgic about the past and impatient about the future. But the boring parts make up most of life.
Wallace says that we do have a choice, no matter who we are. We can choose to slog through our existence in a constant state of anxiety, regret, and boredom – or we can learn to be aware of each moment, and of our thoughts.
Instead of lamenting the state of political affairs or cursing at bad traffic or complaining about the duplicitous nature of a friend, inviting unnecessary stress to your life, you can choose to be aware of the transitory nature of each event, and the futility of your anger. You can choose to not blame others for their faults and expect them to change, to understand that much of their behavior is outside their control, and that if you were in their position, you wouldn’t have acted much differently. You can choose to care only about things that are within your control.
You can choose to a life of mindless reactivity, or you can choose a life of mindfulness
At the beginning of the graduation speech, Wallace recounts a funny parable about fish. There were two young fish swimming happily until they run into an older fish going in the opposite direction who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water? The two fish continue swimming, then one of them looks at the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”
Most of us are like fish, we move around, unaware of the reality around us, and unaware, that at any moment, we can choose to see things for what they are.
“The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe even 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. 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.
David Foster Wallace