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?"
If you're worried that I plan to present
myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is, please don't
be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story
is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the
ones that are the 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. That may sound like hyperbole, or
abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete ...
A huge percentage of
the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out,
totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter 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. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic
self-centredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty
much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default setting,
hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no
experience you've had that you were not at the absolute centre of. The
world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind
you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or
whatever. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated
to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real - you get
the idea. But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you
about compassion or other-directedness or the so-called "virtues". This
is not a matter of virtue - it's a matter of my choosing to do the work
of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default
setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centred, and to see
and interpret everything through this lens of self.
By way of
example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the morning,
go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and
at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all
you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a
couple of hours and then hit the rack early because 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. It's the end of the workday, and the
traffic's 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 it's the time of day when all the other people with
jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's
hideously, fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or
corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but
you can't just get in and quickly out: you have to wander all over the
huge, overlit store's crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you
have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired,
hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially
slow old people and the spacey people and the kids who all block the
aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask
them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your supper
supplies, except now it turns out 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 fury out on the frantic lady working the register.
Anyway,
you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, and
wait to get your cheque or card authenticated by a machine, and then
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 through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot,
and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything
doesn't fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way
home, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy,
SUV-intensive rush-hour traffic, etc, etc.
The point is that
petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing
comes 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 food-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
nonhuman they seem here 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 unfair this is: I've worked really
hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to eat
and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.
Or if I'm
in a more socially conscious form of my default setting, I can spend
time in the end-of-the-day traffic jam being angry and disgusted at all
the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V12 pickup trucks
burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell
on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem
to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the
ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually
talking on cell phones as they cut people off in order to get just 20
stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our
children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel
and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and
disgusting we all are, and how it all just sucks ...
If I choose
to think this way, fine, lots of us do - except that thinking this way
tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice.
Thinking this way is my natural default setting. It's the automatic,
unconscious 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 there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of
situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my
way: it's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs have been in
horrible car accidents in the past and now find driving so traumatic
that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV
so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer that just cut
me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or
sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital,
and he's in a much bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am - it is
actually I who am in his way.
Again, please don't think that I'm
giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you're "supposed to" think
this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it,
because it's hard, it takes will and mental effort, and if you're 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 little child 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 Dept who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a
nightmarish 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 on 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, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and
annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay
attention, then you will know you have other options. It will be within
your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type
situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force
that lit the stars - compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all
things. 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. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what
doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's
something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life,
there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not
worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to
worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or
spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the
Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set
of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship
will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where
you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never
feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty
and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age
start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant
you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified
as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton
of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily
consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you
will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship
your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a
fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
The insidious
thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful;
it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They're the
kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting
more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value
without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the
world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings,
because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on
the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the
worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in
ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal
freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms,
alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to
recommend it. But there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind
that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great
outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really
important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and
discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people
and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy
ways, every day. That is real freedom. 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. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a
whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of
it whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some
finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this is 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 making it to 30,
or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about
simple awareness - awareness of what is so real and essential, so
hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding
ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."
· Adapted from the commencement speech the author gave to a graduating class at Kenyon College, Ohio
