There are this two young fish swimming along
and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way
who nodds at them and says,"morning boys, hows the water?"
and the two young fish swim on for a bit
and then eventually one of them looks over the other
and goes "What the hell is water?"
The point to the fish story is merely the that most
obvious important realities are often the once
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 a 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.
It's the end of the work day
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 it's 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,
over-lit 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
(et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony)
and eventually you get all your supper supplies,
except now it turns out
there aren't enough check-out 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 you pay for your food,
and you get told to "Have a nice day"
in a voice that is the absolute voice of death.
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,
et cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course.
But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 nonhuman
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 and personally unfair this is.
If I choose to think this way in a 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 center of the world,
and that my immediate needs and feelings
are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course,
there are totally different ways
to think about these kinds of situations.
In this traffic,
all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way,
it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's
have been in horrible auto accidents in the past,
and now find driving so terrifying 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,
more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice,
or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way,
or that anyone 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 a husband who is dying of bone cancer.
Or maybe this very lady
is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle 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 what 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 really learn how think, how to pay attention,
then you will know there are 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 made the stars:
love, fellowship,
the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true.
The only thing that's capital-T True
is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit,
is the freedom of a 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 just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura 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."