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?”
This short story has been attributed to a writer David Foster Wallace. I am not sure if it’s indeed his, or he copied it from someone else. It doesn’t matter. To me, it perfectly describes how we live our lives; in our own water, completely unaware of our family dynamic, our cultural programming, our “normal”. We don’t see their specifics or uniqueness; we believe that it is the same and indisputable for everybody else, because… well, it’s normal.
The problem may begin when we meet someone with a different “normal”. It could be the problem, or the opportunity to learn something new and open our horizons. Unfortunately, the first is often the case. Quite frequently, rather than learning something new we try to persuade others that what we see as normal and obvious is the best and the only possible option. That we are right, that we know better.
There are reasons for it. We have learned from the earliest days what was good, what was bad, what was “proper”: behaviour, beliefs, religion, you name it. Everyone around us did and talked the same: it was normal, it was our “water”.
Quite often only when we step out of the “water” we can see that not everybody does and believes the same as us.
Have you ever heard the saying: “One must travel to learn”? (Mark Twain). You can take it literally and set out to travel around the world. No doubt that it is a great way to learn different things about people, cultures, customs, and yourself.
You can also decide to travel out of your water, into somebody else’s reality and learn one or two things about them.
When you learn about others, you learn about yourself. You start seeing that everything you consider the only good, possible, and normal is just an option, not a “must”.
You start seeing your patterns of behaviour, your patterns of thinking, your beliefs.
You start seeing them for what they really are: just the learned patterns, not “the only right and normal “ way of living.
You start seeing the water and giving yourself a choice of trying something different, something that is yours, not imposed on you by your family, your culture, or the society you live in.
You may still decide that you like your water the way it is, but it would be your conscious decision and that counts, doesn’t it?
By Eva Sadowski Photo by Pexels