The Most Fundamental Realization of Your Life ✨
Like a fish in water, this has always been right in front of your face.
📍 Coordinates: The Temple Room, The Nest 🪺 – Argentina.
🎧 Music Pairing: Oppression – The Human Experience.
📖 Reading Time: ~4 minutes.
In 2005, David Foster Wallace addressed the graduating class at Kenyon College with a speech that is now one of his most-read pieces. In it, he argues against “unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.”
He begins with a parable:
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?”
Many of us shrug this off. Yeah, stupid fish. How could they not notice a reality that they are immersed in each and every moment of their existence?
The trouble is that you, too, are immersed in this kind of water.
A realization that once recognized, will change the nature of each moment of your existence. In a largely positive way, I hope.
When I think of something I wish all people would realize more deeply, there is one answer I always return to:
The fact that you experience anything at all is infinitely more significant than any specific experience you have.
Sit with this for a moment.
Read it again.
Say it out loud, in the first person: "The fact that I experience anything at all is infinitely more significant than any specific experience I have."
This is water.
The fact that you have an individual experience is more significant, wildly fascinating, horrifically terrifying, mercilessly painful, and ecstatically blissful than any single individual experience.
And this—like ichigo ichie (one chance, one encounter)—opens the door to the possibility of a radical, total, and fundamental reframing.
You might rewrite it as: the reality that you experience anything at all makes every single moment infinitely meaningful.
One of the small ways this permeates into my life is through cold showers. Once numbing and painful, have become enjoyable and life-affirming.
They remind me of the rich texture of experience, of the inescapable fact of the reality of my beingness. They demonstrate without a shadow of a doubt that my existence is happening. A sobering, powerful, and beautiful reminder.
Because sometimes we forget this, yeah?
Many of us fall into a kind of trance.
A low-wave oscillation between mild contentment, bland comfort, and frequent agitation. Lost are the days of spontaneous joy, deep grief, ecstatic rapture, or volcanic anger.
Life becomes greyscale. Mundane. Expected.
It reminds me of a Michael Pollan quote:
"The good news is that I'm rarely surprised. The bad news is that I'm rarely surprised."
If that experience sounds familiar at all, if not entirely too close to home – that's because of one simple thing:
You've forgotten the water.
You've let go of the most fundamental realization.
The fact that you can experience anything at all, is infinitely more significant than any individual experience you have.
Imagine the best, most wonderfully joyous surprise you've ever had in your life. Maybe a birthday party, or a gift from a loved one.
When this realization is fully integrated, you respond to your entire waking existence like this.
Whether that's the news of a loved one passing, your child's graduation ceremony, the birth of your child, or breaking your arm snowboarding. Whatever it is.
Your existence becomes a wonderland of self-unfolding miracles. And all of it is welcome.
“Oh, grief? Wonderful! Look at this rich, luscious texture of experience.”
“Wow, lust!? Incredible, what a masterpiece of existence.”
“Agh, sharp pain! What a remarkable phenomenological flavour.”
“Ooh, my friend accomplished something great!? Miraculous, what a stimulating sensation.”
You are swimming, always, in all ways, in this ocean of existence. Deeply, totally, fundamentally immersed in the waters of experience.
You cannot be separate from it—this miraculous, spontaneous, organic, emergent happening.
This fundamental realization brings you face-to-face with the suchness of Reality, as the Buddhists would say.
And my God—all of it, and all of you—is absolutely beautiful.
I love you, EB. 💛
Simply beautiful my friend <3
Beautifully written Eric
That intro picture hits hard Im about to have an awakening ;)