Once there were these two young fish happily swimming together. After a while, they encountered an older fish swimming in the opposite direction. The older fish noticed them and greeted them, saying, "Morning, boys. How's the water?" The two young fish continued swimming for a bit, but then one of them turned to the other and asked, "What the hell is water?"
I love this story. I first heard it in a telling by David Foster Wallace. It’s a gentle reminder to observe the world around us, to account for what we pay attention to and to cultivate a broader awareness beyond ourselves.
Have you ever been told that the universe doesn’t revolve around you? Well, I have some good news for you, it kind of does.
Gottfried Leibniz, a German philosopher, proposed an intriguing perspective on the universe. In his attempts to comprehend its Möbius architecture, he argued that there is no fixed backdrop to the universe—no tangible "stuff" of space. Instead, space is merely a way to describe relationships. An extrapolated reading of Leibniz's esoteric text, "The Monadology," suggests that each person represents a unique viewpoint of the entire universe. Therefore, everyone is at its center, with their own distinct view and what we call the universe is just a description of the relationships between viewpoints.
But what are these viewpoints? They are other stories—different narratives of the world, like yours and mine but unique. We are familiar with many of them. We know the stories of our loved ones, our closest colleagues, and our favorite celebrities (at least the ones with no sense of privacy). We devote significant attention to these stories, as we should. However, how often do we direct our attention to the story of the driver who cut us off in traffic this morning or the waiter who accidentally charged us twice for that virgin Cuba libre over the weekend? Trigger warning for sensitive readers. What about the stories of the people who work at home affairs?
When we decide to pay attention to something we deliberately filter out information that’s distracting or less useful to make the more relevant inputs stand out. When we do it unconsciously, this process may sometimes exclude information that could be unexpectedly important, like these other points of view.
Consider the woman who bumped into me with her trolley in the "10 items or less" queue last week. I could have judged her as inconsiderate and assigned to null all other possibilities. But what if I didn’t? What if I paused to consider her perspective? Perhaps she was trying to avoid someone bumping her, or maybe she was preoccupied with thoughts about a big presentation at work. Most likely her focus wasn’t solely on avoiding me with her trolley. There’s a chance she wasn’t as inconsiderate as initially thought—she could just have been dealing with a lot. Besides, the trolley barely touched me.
What about the place we spend most of our lives, the office. How easily do we get frustrated with our colleagues. Why can’t he do it as accurately as me, why is she trying to show off with all those extra spreadsheets? Just because we have equal tasks doesn't mean we approach them with equal experience, expertise, or energy. It's easy to adopt a judgmental mindset and filter out people's stories with simplistic heuristics. He’s lazy, she’s trying to make me look bad. Resisting this automatic system of filtering out people’s stories and opting to engage with their point of view is hard work, but then again, nothing worth doing is easy. If we did, we’d still get frustrated, but it would be less frequent and shorter in duration.
Ultimately, it's not really about the details of each specific story. Instead, we ought just to remember that there is a story. These stories surround us and connect us to each other and just like ours, they hold a central place in the universe. This, my friends, is water.