This is water - by David F. Wallace
A day in the life of a white-collar worker
Snippets from American writer David Foster Wallace‘s 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College.
1. Watch without reading
Transcript
"(...) 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 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 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 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 maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people (...) 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.
(...) but anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food (...)
And 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 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, et cetera, et cetera.
(...)
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 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 look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
(...) 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 centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.
(...)
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.
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 (...).
Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible.
It just depends what you want to consider.
(...)
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline (...).
(...) It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true:
your education really IS the job of a lifetime.
And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck."
Wallace, David Foster. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life . Little, Brown and Company. Kindle Edition.
2. Practise
- What is the no. 1 idea you are taking away from this speech?
Let me know in the comments below.
- What are the 3 new words/expressions/grammar points you want to be able to use confidently?
Give me one example each in the comments below.
3. Consolidate
Weekly study plan and exercises that will help you consolidate the new language used in this speech:
Enjoy your journey and make English part of your Routine.
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Read the full transcript here.
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