In 2005, David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech at Kenyan College called This is Water. It is one of my favorite sources of wisdom, with easily twenty different quotes or lessons I try to keep in mind. Today, I am interested in looking at this quote:
On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Cliches because humans like you and me are good at ignoring the obvious. There is so much wisdom that can help you live a better life in cliches that you or I would snicker at or tune out completely- especially if it’s upholstered on a throw pillow or hung up on the kitchen wall. Unfortunately, we are not laughing at cliches because we have already incorporated them so fully into our lives that we no longer need to be reminded of them. It pays to take a step back and look at wisdom that seems obvious with fresh eyes, in order to remind ourselves of why it is considered wisdom in the first place.
Michael Pollan’s How To Change Your Mind talks about the life-changing takeaways from psychedelic experiences often sounding like “duh” moments. He talks of chronic smokers coming away with the somehow newly felt knowledge that smoking is bad for me, felt in a way that makes them never want to touch a cigarette again. Did they not know that smoking was bad for them before? Of course they did- but in the words of DFW, the trick is keeping the truth up front. In describing what stuck with him form his own psychedelic experience, Pollan writes:
Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. Emotions arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes that wouldn't seem out of place on a Hallmark card flow with the force of revealed truth.
Love is everything.
Okay, but what else did you learn?
No - you must not have heard me; it's everything!
Is a platitude so deeply felt still just a platitude? No, I decided. A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion. To resaturate that dried husk with feeling is to see it again for what it is: the loveliest and most deeply rooted of truths, hidden in plain sight.
While some mushrooms certainly help, we can consciously choose to keep the truth upfront. Try to think of one piece of wisdom that is so obvious and boring, and try to really apply it to your own life- and then do this again and again, until you change your habit from cynical dismissal to heartfelt application of the wisdom humankind has accumulated over the millennia.
You can find the full This is Water speech audio and transcript here- it really is gold, and every time I listen I am struck with a new takeaway piece of wisdom.