This Is Water (Kenyon Commencement)

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?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of little parable-like stories. The story turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I’m planning to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise fish.

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 life, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance.

The immediate point of all this is that a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically sure of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here is one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.

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 exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally besotted.

The real freedom of a real education involves being able to be truly caring about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. 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.