30 days of self-love: attention! this is water

As happens often, I sit down to write one thing, and I’m taken to another. I started off with hydration on my mind and ended up at David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement speech, This is Water. I’ve listened to this speech so many times, and I never tire of it. All these years later, often when I’m in the grocery store on my own, I’ll still hear, “This is water, this is water,” and bring myself present again, out of my head and into the world around me.

Not dissimilar to Aldous Huxley’s mynah birds from his novel, Island. “Attention! Attention! Here and now, boys! Here and now!” Constant reminders to pay attention, life is here, life is now.

Wallace said, “Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education–least in my own case–is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.

As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). 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. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”

I have been thinking about attention a lot lately in my learning, as so much of somatic work is about bringing attention not just to the moment of now, but deeper into sensations, an awareness of our body in the moment and how we show up in it. And how that connects to the stories we are telling ourselves, the meaning we are making from our experience.

Tonight I don’t have any answers. I am noticing, I am paying attention. I am overwhelmed sometimes by how much I feel in my body, the amount of stories I have running in my head at once. I am growing. I am learning myself. I am sometimes at peace, and sometimes I feel like there is a hurricane inside me and I can’t get still, no matter how hard I try. I am loving myself, amidst all of this, within all of this.

Attention, attention.

I am here, I am here.

This is water, this is water.