A couple of months ago this way too long video was circulating around my Facebook feed about water. I ignored it at first, but after it was reposted by several friends I like and admire, I watched it and have gone back to it several times. If you haven't watched it, it's worth your ten minutes. The part that stood out to me came from the graduation speech that inspired the video:
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.
I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
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.”
I keep coming back to these words because I realize at times that I am missing things as I go about my day to day. I am watching life and not stepping in to be a PART of life.
You see, it has come to my attention over the past few weeks/ months that I am no longer a young adult trying to figure it all out and managing invented crisis upon crisis. I am an actual adult with real responsibilities and realities and wrinkles. What I've noticed...
1. I have two gray hairs in the front left side of my head that are actual gray hairs. Not just blond ones that look different in another light.
2. Recently I've found that I am being called ma'am a lot more often than miss.
3. I do not understand WHY ON EARTH anyone would ever twerk on TV. The appeal of the whole VMA performance is lost on me.
4. My friends now have real challenges. Aging parents. Children with VERY scary illnesses. Divorce. REAL stuff that has real, powerful consequences.
The list goes on and on, but all signs point to a new place for me in the world. For some people that epiphany happened well before 37. For me, that understanding is unfolding right now. So here I am. For those who beat me to it, thank you for being patient with my smart-ass self all these years.
While I tentatively march forward into true adulthood, I am going to try to choose awareness of what is around me. That means there are some things that have to change and it's OK. Some are out of my control (gray hair, Miley Cyrus) and some are not. I have had the blessing of a real education thrust upon me. I can choose to care and be the best version of me I can be or I can follow another one of the myriad of paths in front of me. I have a choice.
This is water.
xo friends...
E
