This is Water.
It’s a shame that the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust took down the short film called “This is Water” that was made from the excerpt of his Kenyon College graduation speech in 2005. His work means so much to me, and I thought the video really was able to reach a wider audience, to give some solid advice to all of those newly minted adults swimming upstream into the “Real World.” That enjoying this world is a choice, that “the really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
I’ve been in the “Real World” for 3 years, and I wish I had realized that I was swimming through water sooner. I wish I had attached tethers to those things that grounded me, and cut the ties of the things that have held me back.
