Uplifting Our Perspective
What I watched: This Is Water! by David Foster Wallace. Posted December 15, 2013.
In a recent Seth Abramson post, The Best Videos on the Internet, Vol. 1, among the videos he highlights is a multimedia visualization of a portion of the famous commencement speech given by Wallace at Kenyon College on May 21, 2005.
The point of Wallace’s speech is to instill in his student audience an appreciation of their liberal education as a lifelong foundation for how to think better and how to choose what to focus that thinking on to best appreciate some of the more obvious but less appreciated aspects of life.
While I will provide a few pull quotes herein, the entire speech can be listened to or read and I recommend doing so. It is truly superb.
After introducing his speech with a couple of pertinent didactic stories, a staple of graduation commencement speeches, Wallace quickly gets to one of his main points. Two people can see the exact same situation in entirely different ways depending on the belief template through which they are assessing the situation.
We have all witnessed this phenomenon. Two people look at an unequivocally factual situation yet arrive at two entirely different conclusions. One need only look at something like the often diametrically opposed political culture divide in the United States today to see a perfect example of conflicting opinions about the same set of factual scenarios.
So, Wallace rightfully suggests that perhaps we should all be a bit less arrogant about our opinions and deploy more critical thinking in our day-to-day experience. Too often we end up defaulting to a rigid baseline viewpoint and then engage is whatever mental gymnastics are required to satisfy our stubborn confirmation bias, thereby ensuring that we can live another day convinced we are smarter and more enlightened than others.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Of course, part of the default wiring to which we all fall prey is the monumental self-centeredness that we operate under. None of us want to admit this truth. It is one of our less attractive qualities. Many of us, myself included, often proclaim an intellectual freedom from steadfast opinions and beliefs, but we are fooling ourselves.
In addition to our templated belief systems that at times seem constructed more of immovable cement than flexible clay, we must trudge through the pervasive feeling that the entire world revolves around us.
Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all 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-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self…
So much of what I have learned over the years validates Wallace’s contention that we are indeed self-centered (I admit to this readily), that our beliefs are more static and less fluid than our educated selves want to believe, and that meaningful critical thinking is more difficult than the lip service it is given might denote.
Whether it is when I have attended a mindfulness in business culture conference like Wisdom 2.0, or read a centering book like Be Here Now by Ram Dass, or sought guidance in meditation from a teacher or a book like one I just recently read, A Monk’s Guide to Happiness: Meditation in the 21st Century by Gelong Thubten, the wisdom of paying attention to the obviousness and beauty of what is in front of us in the here and now is a universal teaching that we humans evidently need to keep learning. We keep deviating from its wise counsel. We are told to harness such in-the-moment awareness and hone our thinking processes to focus better on things of great value and meaning.
…Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: 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. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”
In the next section of his speech Wallace presents his audience with the stark banality that is an everyday experience for all of us: grocery shopping in a crowded store, driving through horrifically clogged traffic, or any of the other daily routine drudgery that takes up a significant portion of a 24-hour period.
We can focus on the negatives, the darker side of such experiences, by wallowing in self-pity, thinking less of others in our surroundings who for whatever reason are not living up to our expectations and standards, or otherwise being wrapped up in our delusion that we are so much better than all these people. It bolsters our back patting arrogance, but serves little other purpose. This is common. Think of the bullshit you read on social media every day with friends, family and strangers laying a stake in the ground for some absolutism fueled by their background, religion, politics, social status, level of wealth, and so on.
Wallace utilizes the ubiquitous shared experience of going to and from the grocery store and the slog of food shopping to illustrate how common such daily sameness is in our collective lives, but then asks his audience to pivot their worldview to see the exact same set of circumstances in a more present and compassionate manner. Wallace contends that it is in these moments of seemingly monotonous, endless manifestations of the daily grind that we must rally to focus our attentions consciously on where we place our mental energies.
Thoughtful and wise minds throughout history have said much the same in different words. Buddha is said to have put it this way.
We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.
Wallace contends that it is better to muster one’s educated mind and focus by metaphorically moving our sightline and looking at life through a more compassionate lens.
…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.
Most people reading this are fully aware that life is complex and complicated. No two experiences of life are the same. Some are born with a golden spoon in their mouth, and some are born of the most miserable of origins and yet we know they and the entire spectrum of demographics in between can be wrestling with demons or life’s harshness that we can barely imagine. Such mental wrestling manifests as behaviors, opinions, or actions that piss us off and make us think less of others. No one reading this can claim they have not summarily dismissed people in this way.
However, if one is dedicated to any semblance of growth and self-improvement it is incumbent on us to work past such negative default tendencies and utilize our education, experience, and empathy to think outside of our tiny, self-centered world.
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.
Then Wallace gives us all a moment of pause regarding how we have reacted so many times to life’s boring, frustrating, or befuddling scenarios. He suggests that maybe, just maybe, we might look at the same things going on around us with a more expansive and empathy-driven interpretation.
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 want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating 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 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. You get to decide what to worship.
The entirety of Wallace’s speech packs so much wisdom into so few words that if you have not yet accessed the link earlier in this post to the full audio and text of his speech, I recommend you do so now. It is a master class in doling out advice with all the stereotypical niceties and clichés stripped away.
Another way to look at Wallace’s directive is to live each day with a bit more kindness. Give others the benefit of the doubt. Put yourself in other people’s shoes. You get my drift. If we all work on changing our default setting from assuming the worst to assuming the best, without being Pollyanna about it, then both our lives and the lives around us will improve considerably.
Have a great day.