This is Water!

If you want to use this doodle, you can by all means.  Do let me know if you plan to at jamuna.inamdar@gmail.com :)

Inspired by David Foster Wallace's commencement address to Graduate students of Kenyon College in 2005

Some Snippets:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?" The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

....he really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.

The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.

Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.

Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted", which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

.....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.

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

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.

Eat Pray Love

Last evening when I was thinking about hope, fear, faith, freedom, search, patterns, love (Whoa, all that!)
I picked up for the nth time Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love. 
And It became all OK. 
As far as I am concerned, answers to some of my gravest questions clearly lie in this piece of what some have called "chick-lit."


As I flipped through...I read:

Karma is a notion I have always liked. Not so much literally. Not necessarily because I believe that I used to be Cleopatra's bartender -  but more metaphorically. The Karmic philosophy appeals to me on a more metaphorical level because even in one lifetime it's obvious how we must repeat our same mistakes, banging our heads against the same old addictions and compulsions, generating the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we can finally stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of Karma (and also  of Western Psychology,by the way) - take care of the problems now or else you'll just have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time.  And that repetition of suffering - that's hell. Moving out of that endless repetition to a new level of understanding - there's where you'll find heaven. - Page 274

But how can I accept bliss when it comes with this dark crushing underside - bone-crushing isolation, corrosive insecurity, insidious resentment and, of course, the complete dismantling of self that inevitably occurs when David ceases to giveth, and commences to taketh away.  I can't do it anymore.  Something about my recent joy in Naples has made me certain that I not only can find happiness without David, but must.  I have to say good-bye to David now. - Page 88

I can't remember the last time I got dressed up, but this evening I dug out my one fancy spaghetti-strap dress from the bottom of my backpack and slithered it on.  I even wore lipstick. I can't remember the last time I wore lipstick - Page 279

We were talking the other evening about the phrases one uses when trying to comfort someone who is in distress.  I told him that in English we sometimes say, "I've been there".  This was unclear to him at first - I have been where?  But I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of sorrow, you cannot imagine that you can ever find your way to a better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place,and now have moved on, sometimes this will bring hope.  "So sadness is a place?" Giovanni asked. "Sometimes people live there for years," I said. In return, Giovanni told me, empathizing Italians say L'ho provato sulla mia pelle, which means "I have experienced that on my own skin".  - Page 75

Richard from Texas is not a guy who worries about a lot of stuff. I wouldn't call him a neurotic person, no sir. But I am a bit neurotic, and that is why I have come to adore him. Richard's presence at the Ashram becomes my great and amusing sense of security. His giant ambling confidence hushes down all my inherent nervousness and reminds me that everything is going to be OK. (And if not OK, then at least comic.) In Richard's own words: "Me and Groceries, we steady be laughin' the whole damn time".  - Page 146

If you want to use this doodle, you can by all means.  If you want a high res version, do ask at jamuna.inamdar@gmail.com :)

Find the Floodgates within.

Know when to Shut.

Know when to Open.

Or in Other words,

ताब लाये हि बनेगी ग़ालिब 
के वाक़या सक्त है 
और जाँ अजीज़