"This is Water: A More Kinder Possibility"
"This May I reread David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address, This Is Water. Someone recently wrote that each reading “rewires their brain,” and I feel the same. While returning to the speech this year, I was also immersed in re-reading a few of Carl Jung’s perennial essays (Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963), and the resonance between the two thinkers is close. I began weaving Wallace’s insights together with a depth‑psychological perspective, hoping to translate their shared wisdom into something we can carry through rush‑hour traffic, grocery lines, current national angst, or 1:00 am self‑doubt.
Dodd’s Narrows
Wallace invites us to notice the “water,” the invisible medium of assumptions, beliefs, and habits that surrounds us. Jung would describe it as a blend of ego consciousness, the daylight mind that thinks it is steering the ship, and the vast unconscious, where ancestral stories, forgotten memories, and archetypal patterns quietly arrange the scenery. When the ego forgets that deeper context, it mistakes its small porthole view for the entire horizon. Each morning, before dawn arrives, I place a hand on my chest and ask, What water am I swimming in right now, and later today? Naming the current, sometimes hurry, comparison, fear, anxiety, not knowing, joy or even satisfaction, loosens its grip and lets the wider psyche breathe through me. Now, there is room for curiosity to exist, as opposed to re-generating limiting, unexamined certainty.
To illustrate the danger of unexamined certainty Wallace tells a bar‑room story from the Alaskan wilderness. An atheist explains how he survived a blizzard after dropping to his knees and pleading, “God, if you exist, save me.” Two Inuit hunters soon appeared and led him back to camp. Safe inside a bar he recounts the tale. A religious man says, “You must believe now, after all, you are alive.” The atheist replies, “No, all that happened was a couple of hunters wandered by.” One event, two interpretations, both airtight and self‑assured. Jung would call this a clash of shadows, the disowned parts of ourselves we project onto others. Beneath the atheist’s disdain and the believer’s triumph lies a shared vulnerability: the terror of meaninglessness and the hunger for assurance. The practice here is simple, though never easy. When certainty hardens in conversation, soften the shoulders, feel the chair beneath you, breathe into the belly, and ask, What else might be true? That single question can open the cell of blind conviction and let humility walk in.
Humility is indispensable on the days that grind us down. Picture a long meeting, clogged traffic, and a supermarket aisle where every cart squeaks. The ego’s default script mutters, Why is everyone in my way? Yet Jung’s idea of the Self, an inner center that seeks wholeness, offers another storyline. Each face we pass carries its own ocean of worry and hope; even a fluorescent aisle is a gathering place for earth’s generosity. When agitation spikes, inhale through the nose, lengthen the exhale, and silently bless the nearest stranger. Often that single gesture flips the scene from consumer hell to a quiet cathedral of shared fragility.
Because, as Wallace insists, we get to choose our thoughts, and we also choose what we worship. Whether money, beauty, power, intellect; Nature, art, poetry, family, something receives our steady devotion. Jung observed that whatever commands our psychic energy becomes our personal god‑image; if we serve it unconsciously, it enslaves us. A weekly altar audit can help keep conscious our attachments, which fuels our ability to make choices, as opposed to maintaining unconscious, unexamined certainty. Scan the past seven days and notice where time, money, and emotional heat clustered. The breadcrumb trail never lies about what we adored. Then consciously enthrone what we want to serve—kindness during a tense deadline, courage when an old voice whispers that we are not enough. The choice may seem small, yet it redirects the nervous system toward freedom.
None of this is a one‑time revelation. Awareness is perishable, Wallace says, and Jung would agree that the unconscious quickly draws yesterday’s insight back below the surface. So we practice: naming our water, loosening certainty, re‑storying crowded afternoons, realigning our altars. Education in this sense is not about stacking facts; it is about living awake to what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight. The world is louder now than when Wallace spoke two decades ago, the distractions shinier, the default settings slicker. Still, the invitation remains: notice, choose, bless, repeat.
And when we forget—when we find ourselves eye‑rolling like the atheist or crowing like the believer—may we remember the deeper ocean beneath every stance. May we smile at our own guppy‑like innocence, whisper “This is water,” and begin again, swimming side by side toward a wider, kinder possibility.”
Essay, by Brenda Littleton, May 23rd, 2025
Photo by B. Littleton, “Dodd’s Narrows”.