Recommended viewing – This Is Water
In this Issue: a Commencement speech that transcends Commencement: This is Water by David Foster Wallace
T.S. Eliot said “April is the cruellest month.” And as beautiful as spring is on campus, the end of the semester often brings a lot of stress to our students: looming deadlines, too many competing priorities (academic as well as social), etc. It can be easy to focus on frustrations, pressures, worries.
Whenever I find myself overwhelmed, filled with complaints, or just generally needing to readjust my attitude, I go to 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 at this point in the semester. 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 pressures 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.
The point 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 during your daily commute, or on a walk around your neighborhood, or with your family after dinner (caveat if you have young 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 keep listening anyway. I am tempted to pepper in a ton of quotes here (in case you don’t watch), but I will settle with this:
“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….
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.”
So if you are feeling like April is the cruellest month, here is a gentle reminder that we can choose how and what we think. I hope you think it’s worth your time: This Is Water.