Recommended viewing – This Is Water
It’s Day 3 of telecommuting for virtually all faculty and staff, and we have a very, very small number of students on campus. I suspect that most of you reading this are also trying to figure out the “new normal,” whether that is working from home, having your children home from K-12 or college unexpectedly, etc. I got a ray of light in my inbox from a Daily Deac dad yesterday, who responded to my Four Senses of LDFRN post with his Deac Daughter’s day; he gave me permission to share this:
So, here are a few snapshots of what my Wake Forest ‘23 daughter did yesterday.
Cried with a friend of hers over FaceTime.
Gloated to her brother that she doesn’t have class yet and he does (he’s a junior in HS and they started virtually yesterday).
She painted stuff for her residence hall room next year.
Made cookies.
And as I was going to bed, she was FaceTiming with some more of her friends – all I could hear was laughing and cutting up.
In other words, she was a college student. Not a full stay up until 3:00 AM, complain about assignments and professors, “dad, can I have more money?” college student, but a college student nonetheless.
Take heart. Better times are coming. For sure. I am seeming glimmers here already.
I hope you take some comfort in that. I certainly did.
Deac Dad’s email reminded of a speech I listen to a couple times a year because I find it so meaningful, especially when I am going through something tough or feel like I need to readjust my attitude. It’s a Commencement speech by the late author David Foster Wallace called This Is Water. Longtime Daily Deac-ers have seen this in the blog before.
It is a really good speech, and I think particularly applicable right now. One of David Foster Wallace’s key messages is we have the gift of being able to choose how we react to what life hands us. We can choose to be irked by the frustrations and the indignities of the day, we can interpret other people’s actions with anger or cynicism, OR we can imagine that those indignities and frustrations apply to other people too, not just us. We can even imagine other people might be going through an unbelievably tough time and are not meaning to make our lives harder – and maybe offer them grace.
Right now we are all faced with anxiety, frustration, sacrifice, and uncertainty. Many things are out of our control. Everyone is feeling a lot of feelings. The only thing that is in our control right now is we have the power to choose how we think about our circumstances.
This Is Water is 22 minutes – which feels like an eternity in a time where none of us seem to have the patience to wait 30 seconds for a video to load 😊 – but it’s something you can listen to in the background from your work-from-home, or on a walk around your neighborhood just to get out of the house (at appropriate social distances), or with your family after dinner (caveat if you have little kids in your house: it does say “bullshit” and “sucks” a couple of times).
This is a speech that builds to make its point, so bear with the parts that you might think don’t apply and plug on anyway. I am tempted to pepper in a ton of quotes here (in case you don’t watch), but I will settle with this one, because I think it speaks to where so many of us are right now:
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”
Right now we are all in that self-sacrifice moment. And we can choose how we think and feel about that. I hope you think it’s worth your time: This Is Water.