This Is Water
Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life
A commencement speech about attention: how you choose to see the dull, irritating parts of adult life is the whole game
The full text of the commencement speech David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College in 2005, printed one sentence to a page. Its subject is attention: the dull, petty frustrations of adult life, the supermarket queue and the traffic jam, and the daily choice of how to see them. Wallace argues that this choice, made or dodged, is what an education is actually for. He died three years later.
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James Clear
Learning “how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It can be easy to spend our entire lives accepting our natural default ways of thinking rather than choosing to look differently at life. The only thing that is capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see life and how you construct meaning from experience.
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