Life is Short But This is Water
One of the greatest graduation speeches ever.
It’s still watch-from-the-window weather in LDN.
But we can’t sit around waiting for summer.
Life is short.
And because life is short, in theory, one should only do positive, useful, and meaningful things.
Does it make any difference to know that? It has for me. It means arguments of the form “Life is too short for x” have great force. It’s not just a figure of speech to say that life is too short for something. It’s not just a synonym for annoying. If you find yourself thinking that life is too short for something, you should try to eliminate it if you can — Paul Graham
Paul Graham encourages one to remove as much of the bullshit as possible.
Things that make his ‘bullshit hit list’ include the following:
Unnecessary meetings, pointless disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people’s mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes.
This is all well and good, if possible.
But I don’t think it is for most people. Instead, I’d vouch for David Foster Wallace’s more agentic idea.
It involves changing how you think.
One often-told story in 12-step programs is about two young fish swimming along. They pass by an older fish swimming in the other direction, the older one greets them and says ‘Morning boys, how’s the water?’. The two younger fish keep swimming before one eventually turns to the other and says, ‘What the hell is water?’.
David Foster Wallace used this analogy in a fabulous commencement speech at Kenyon College back in 2005. A speech you can listen to here.
There seem to be endless reasons for not pursuing a liberal arts degree — all valid and logical. And, I sometimes wonder if my time doing history, politics, and philosophy could have been better spent bartending in Bali.
However, this speech encapsulates what such a degree is trying to achieve.
It’s about noticing what is hidden in plain sight all around us, the way water is to fish, is the freedom and choice to decide what to think about.
Typical history essay questions ask us to ‘discuss the factors that led to x, y, or z’ and ‘to what extent…’
There was no ‘right’ answer. Any answer could be if you can form an argument. In short, you get to choose what you think.
I don’t know if anything is more important for mental stability.
Only mindfulness can help us see the water.
Foster Wallace talks about ‘blind certainty’. Describing it as ‘a closed-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he’s locked up’.
To his credit, despite being invested in academia, he recognises that the industry has created people that ruminate, over-intellectualize, and who get pulled into endless abstract debates devoid of real meaning.
All of this, he says, is at the expense of what is directly in front of us.
Learning how to think really means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience — David Foster Wallace
In short, only mindfulness can help us see the water.
He goes on to give the following relatable and mundane example from everyday life.
You end a busy day at work and all you want to do is relax before sleeping early because, of course, you have to do it all again tomorrow.
But you remember there is no food at home, so you need to ‘nip’ into the local shop for a few things.
It carries on like this:
The store is 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 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. 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 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.
It’s normal to think like this. It’s our default wiring. But, it’s also suffering.
Since first reading this a few years ago, I’ve made a conscious effort to question frustrations as they arise, it’s not always possible to reframe but it is possible to let go.
It’s tricky, really tricky, trust me. I’ve been doing it for a few years. You sit with yourself alone for 15 minutes before you sleep or when you wake up. It’s much harder than one and a half hours in the gym because your mind is going everywhere — Mo Salah
That’s why, even though meditation is so hard, it may be possible to one day go further than merely letting go. To one day get the texture of your mind to the reframe posed by Foster Wallace below:
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 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 get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way. 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 harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Life Hack
Graveyard strolls as a stress relief.
Working in an office near a graveyard has an unexpected benefit. Whenever a hint of stress creeps up, I make a beeline for the headstones and tombs of Teddington cemetery. When you see the ages people died, the significance of your seemingly insurmountable problem is reduced. That, and movement shows that everything is transient.
Cool Closing Words
I’ve been reminded of my time in Chicago recently, and how cool the place is. But not everyone can describe it like this:
You wake up in Chicago, pull back the curtain, and you KNOW where you are. You could be nowhere else. You are in a big, brash, muscular, broad shouldered motherfuckin’ city — Anthony Bourdain