This is Water

David Foster Wallace, author of books such as Infinite Jest, and known for his absurd yet brilliant humor, is not surprisingly an inspiration of mine. Like many of my inspirations, he's one I've only read one book from, but I loved Infinite Jest and will gladly read more Wallace in the future. But that's not the point.

The video above was created from an abridged version of his famous speech "This is Water," which he gave to a graduating class in 2005. I'm going to let you watch it, and then we'll talk it.

Finished? All right. Let's begin.

The video begins with one of my favorite stories, which is the one about the fish, swimming along, when the older fish swims up and says "hey boys, how's the water." The boys ignore the older fish and swim away, until one of them turns to the others and says, "what the hell is water?"

This simple story leads into the rest of the video where Wallace discusses the water of our every day lives, that is, the default way we view the world. I won't retell the brunt of it, that's what watching the video is for. Instead I'm going to tell my own "This is water" story. Which I'll then end with a poem about said experience.

If you didn't know or just forgot, I grew up in Michigan. There's a million different ways that growing up in Michigan is exactly the same as growing up anywhere else, but here is what is different. It snows there. A lot. It not only snows it gets cold and it stays cold. All of which were things I was tired of at about age high school. I spent most of my high school and college years hating the snow, hating the cold, and wanting nothing more than spring to arrive.

My junior year of college I started taking poetry classes. I took them because I needed a third creative writing course, after fiction and non-fiction writing. At the time I was planning on being the next Steven King so poetry was just the better alternative to play writing, which I had no interest in. But something strange happened. I loved it.

I not only loved it, but it changed the way I looked at the world. Suddenly I realized there were people out there looking intently at their lives and writing about it. Not just making up stories, but painting beautiful interpretations of things which I had always thought just were.

Well it turned out that wasn't the case. Things not only were, but they could be viewed. And so, after my first poetry class ended in the summer of 2007, I made a decision. I couldn't wait for winter to arrive. I couldn't wait to see the snow with new eyes, to see the world in a different way. I waited, and waited, and that winter I got my wish. Winter came.

I'm not going to tell you about how I viewed it differently, like I said, I'll show you. Here's the poem.

Snowfall

Past the second month of sunlight only during working hours, past the slush-mucked crosswalks

darkening pants just trying to do their jobs, past asthmatic walls. So to hell with the potential wet cold and to hell with the known cold, there is nowhere to go that isn't cold so there is a field and there is something across it so might as well walk through the, of course-

Untouched white

reflects the black,

holds up the night.

Exhalations linger,

static between the self

and cold.

Ground absorbs the sound.

Each step

crunching out your

firstness.

When I finally got out of my "I hate winter" mindset, I realized it was a hell of a beautiful thing which is going to give me a lot more poems in the future. And it's a mindset which I've adopted through most of my life as well. Which is the weirder part of my life I think. What my normal mindset is. And this part begins with a question a student asked me once.

It was after I had established myself as a sub at one of the high schools I work at, and a student asked me what I thought the meaning of life is. And I gave a simple, one word response.

Happiness.

And it is what I believe the meaning of life is. Happiness is my static state, except when I'm in the car which is a different story. But I view the world through a different lens then being frustrated by the normal grind of reality and it lets me have the experiences like the poem above details. It feels damn good.

So I encourage you to take a moment and try to see the water around you. Maybe your water is fine, but maybe it's a little murky and you might need to find a different view. Who knows, maybe you just might see the snow for what it is if you do.