SUBTITLES BY APM http://www.aaronpaulmarcus.com/
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,
important realities are often the ones
that are 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 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.
and it's the end of the workday, 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, this is 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, overlit
store's confusing aisles to find the stuff
you want
and you have to maneuver your junky cart through
all these other tired, hurried people with
carts,
etc, etc, cutting stuff out because it's a
long ceremony
and eventually you get all your supper supplies,
except now it turns out that 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 meaninglessness
surpasses the imagination of any of us here
at a prestigious college
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout
line's front, and pay for your food,
and get told to “Have a nice day” in a
voice that is the absolute voice 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, bumpy,
littery parking lot,
and then you have to drive all the way home
through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive rush-hour
traffic,
etcetera, etcetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course, but
it hasn't yet been part of your graduate's
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 going to 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 going to 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 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 just in MY way,
and who are all these people 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 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 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 that, of course, that there are
totally different ways to think about these
times and situations
In this traffic, all these vehicles stopping
and idling in my way
it's not impossible that some of these people
in SUVs have been in horrible auto accidents
in the past
and now find driving so terrifying that 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 everyone else in the supermarket's
checkout line
is just as bored and frustrated as I am
and that some of these people probably have
much harder or 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 that you're
supposed to think this way,
or that everyone expects you to just automatically
do it
because it's hard; it takes will and effort
and if you are like me, some days you 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 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 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 and who and what is really
important.
if you want to operate on your default setting,
then
you, like me,
probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and
miserable.
But if you've really learned how to think,
how to pay attention,
then you will know you have 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 deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff's necessarily
true.
The only thing that's capital-T True is that
you get to decide how you're going to 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/lawyer 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 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.
SUBTITLES BY APM http://www.aaronpaulmarcus.com/
