This is Water

Hi Friend,

Welcome back to the newsletter.

I hope your summer is winding down well.

I don’t know about you, but I’m incredibly looking forward to fall…. Cooler weather, jeans, sweaters, and football season... Sign me up.

We've still got a few weeks before then, so let's explore a topic that feels like summer.

Water. Just not in the way you're expecting.

Let’s jump in.

Over the weekend, I visited Ocean City, NJ with my family. We spent hours relaxing on the beach and in conversation with one another. It was a much-needed breather.

One of the surprising highlights was watching the documentary “The End of the Tour.”

Receiving a 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, this film masterfully chronicles a 5-day interview that took place in 1995 between author David Foster Wallace and Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky.

David Foster Wallace, played by Jason Segal, is in the middle of his book tour for “Infinite Jest,” a 1007-page beast that’s widely considered one of the novels ever written when he is visited by journalist David Lipsky, played by Jesse Eisenburt, who feels called to share Wallace's story with the world.

The acting from Jason and Jesse is straight-up masterful and the storyline is quite captivating as well, despite being a somewhat-cerebral documentary.

I’d highly highly recommend watching the film if/when you have a chance, but today, I’m going to share a more digestible form of David Foster Wallace’s ideas that I found after being inspired by the film.

In 2015, David Foster Wallace delivered a commencement speech to Kenyon College that is now (somewhat well) known as “This is Water.”

It’s brilliant & entertaining on a number of levels and can be found on YouTube HERE and summarized in this succinct article HERE.

The speech begins with a light-hearted story of two young fish swimming along and meeting an older fish who says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?”

The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

Wallace points out that “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.”

He goes on to illustrate some of the most fundamental lessons of human adulthood, including how to think properly, how to choose meaning, and ultimately, how to create real freedom.

I could try to summarize some of these ideas more specifically, but/and I’d really just encourage you to go listen to it Here.

Or check the book summary I mentioned above. It slaps.

It’s 20 minutes well-spent and could very well inform the way you approach life forever.

Here's a quick blurb of one of my favorite excerpts, below.

“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.

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.”

I appreciate you reading and hope you have an incredible week ahead.

With love & gratitude,

Aidan