Despite knowing that no one necessarily expects me to have crystallized ideas of where these next few years will take me, I have difficulty at times not knowing myself.

There are so many things to “consider.” Career. Money. Love. Health. Words mired in endless connotations that they almost lose their dimension. So symbolic and broad are they of what it is to be/be working towards as a (productive, thoughtful, successful, happy, yadda yadda) human that they can be difficult to approach.

For class I just finished David Foster Wallace’s The Broom of the System, a concentrated force of a novel that takes up lots of questions about meaning/symbols/language/purpose/(yadda yadda to this too), published when he was just 24. In thinking about many of the questions the book raises as well as my own, I was reminded of the commencement address he gave to Kenyon graduates many years later.

“The most obvious, important realities” Wallace notes, “are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance.”

And perhaps the reminder I like most: “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”

What Wallace reminds us in his talk is that the only capital-T Truth is that we get to choose how to frame things to ourselves. We have the privilege and the power to revel in unsexiness. We have choice in what we ascribe meaning to or how we perceive the world, be it in the context of our inter-personal relationships or a culture of innovation.

“This is Water” is a beautiful rumination on choice and of how to foster a dynamic within one’s mind/heart to find freedom and fulfillment in the day to day. Whether or not you’ve listened to the talk before, I’d suggest doing so again.

By Hannah Horowitz, Changemaker Taylor Fellow