This Is Water, a Reflection

458 Words2 Pages
I judge speeches based on their retaining abilities. So, I waited a couple of hours after I listened to an audio copy of the speech while reading its transcription, before I wrote this reflection paper. Well, I do remember David Foster Wallace’s fish story at the beginning that’s for sure. It’s always those little anecdotes that the audience takes home. The great thing about Wallace’s commencement speech is, it runs deeper than that. It is ironic, how he kept saying that he doesn’t want his speech to be a lesson on morality. Because that’s exactly how I recall his speech being. His speech reminds me of this quote from Plato, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Never have I thought that living by this mantra would equal you as someone who has earned a liberal arts education, or at least someone who makes better choices in life. I have always thought that it’s just the considerate thing to do. I’m hypersensitive towards other’s feelings— not that I’m saying that’s how I think all the time. It sounds simple, but it couldn’t be anymore complicated to live by. Say for example, I realize now that I started this paper with the most used word in the English language, “I”. I’m not counting how many “I”s I’ve used as I’m sure it ate a huge chunk of this paper (let alone, this sentence), but it just proves the fact that everyone has a tendency to be self-centered. I realize now that he’s right about education teaching us how to think. It takes practice to internalize a discerning view of the world. Back in high school, I remember how my classmates and I would constantly ask, “What is the point of learning factoring polynomials? It’s not like we can use this in everyday life.” His speech shed light on so much light on how to deal properly with life through being educated. Though, there was one thing kept distracting me as I listened to David
Open Document