My Head is Swimming
Hello,
You probably already know this about me...I love audiobooks.
One of the things I've noticed over the years is that when I spend enough time with a narrator, I sometimes start sounding like them. If the book is set in a different region, I might find myself picking up an accent. If a character has a favorite expression, I might start using it without realizing it.
A while back, I listened to a novel in which one character repeatedly said, "God damn it" a lot. A few days later, I caught myself saying it. My reaction was immediate, "Yikes! That isn't me." The phrase wasn't part of my normal vocabulary. I wasn't trying to adopt it. I hadn't consciously decided to start saying it. Yet there it was, slipping into my speech simply because I had spent enough time hearing it.
What startled me wasn't the phrase itself. It was how little exposure it took. If a fictional character could influence the way I spoke after a matter of days, what else was shaping me without my noticing?
That question brought me back to David Foster Wallace's famous commencement speech, This Is Water.
In the story, two young fish are swimming along when they pass an older fish. The older fish nods and says, "Morning, boys. How's the water?"
The younger fish continue swimming until eventually one turns to the other and asks, "What the hell is water?"
The story has stayed with me for years because it captures something profoundly human. The things that influence us most are often the things we no longer see.
Familiar
Years ago, I worked in a place where people constantly used the word "capture."
"Can you capture that in the notes?"
"Did you capture that idea?"
"I'll capture that and send it out."
The first few times I heard it, it sounded strange. Nobody in my previous workplace used the word that way. Then one day I heard myself say it, and eventually I stopped noticing it altogether. The word had gone from unusual to familiar.
The same thing happened when I started a new job last year. One of the first things I wanted to know was how birthday celebrations worked. At previous schools, there had always been a system. Sometimes there was a rotating schedule. Sometimes there was a committee. Someone organized the card. Someone brought the dessert. It was so commonplace that I assumed every workplace handled birthdays in roughly the same way.
They didn't. In my new environment, it wasn't even something people thought about.
Neither approach was right or wrong. What struck me was how easily I had mistaken familiarity for universality. I had assumed something was normal simply because it had been normal for me. The older I get, the more I realize how often that happens.
The Water
Most of us are very good at noticing sudden change. We notice a new haircut, a new policy, a new routine, or a new face. What we often miss are the forces that shape us gradually. The language we hear every day, behaviors that are rewarded, the assumptions that go unquestioned, the jokes people tell. We don't notice the ways people talk to one another or the expectations that quietly become part of the culture. None of these things announce themselves as influential. They simply surround us long enough that they begin to feel ordinary.
That is the brilliance of Wallace's fish story. The fish don't know what water is because water is everywhere. It is the background of their existence. They have never experienced anything else, so they never think to examine it.
People aren't much different. We grow accustomed to the environments we inhabit. Families develop norms and workplaces develop habits. Communities develop cultures and friend groups create their own expectations and language. Over time, those things become invisible.
Paying Attention
I don't think the goal is to become suspicious of every influence in our lives. The reality is that we are always being shaped by something. We learn from one another, absorb ideas, and borrow habits. We adapt to the environments around us, and much of that is healthy and necessary.
What matters is maintaining enough awareness to occasionally step back and ask what is shaping us. Not all water is the same. Some environments encourage curiosity, generosity, humility, and growth. Others can slowly normalize cynicism, contempt, fear, or behaviors that would have once felt foreign to us. The challenge is that we rarely notice those shifts while they are happening. By the time something feels normal, we have often stopped examining it.
That is why I keep returning to the image of those fish. The older fish wasn't really asking about the water. He was inviting the younger fish to notice the environment they had taken for granted.
Maybe that is something all of us need to do from time to time. Pause. Look around. Pay attention to what has become familiar. Then ask yourself whether the water you're swimming in is helping you become the person you want to be.
~Heather
P.S. My Catch of the Week this week is the story of two giant tortoises at a zoo that spent more than 100 years having the same brief daily "fight." According to zoo staff, the feud began when one tortoise allegedly stole food from the other decades earlier. Over time, the original reason was forgotten, but the ritual remained. Every day, they repeated the same interaction, long after anyone knew why it had started.
I laughed when I read it, but it also made me wonder how often people do the same thing.
How many disagreements, routines, or assumptions continue simply because they have become habits? How often do we find ourselves reacting to people or situations based on stories that no longer apply, or reasons we can no longer remember?
The catch is not about tortoises. It is about us. Every once in a while, it is worth asking, "Why am I still doing this?" We may discover that the answer made perfect sense once, but no longer serves us today.
P.P.S. Please remember to...
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