This Is Water

David Foster Wallace giving the commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005. The full text can be found here.

For me, the most essential part is this:

"...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. Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't."

Wallace's sacred option is the one I choose. To stop, take a breath and see again this world and everyone in it glowing with the fire of love and the miracle that we are here, together.