This weekend I had the opportunity of an interesting conversation with a young coachee.
Going back to David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech “This is Water” provides an interesting way to think about this conversation and try to gain a better understanding of what he meant to describe.
It was evident that the young coachee was focused on herself. Her reactions to our conversation regularly interpreted what was being said as linked to herself. She was seeing it through what it meant to her or how it could relate to her. Taking it this way was so natural to her that she could not see it unfolding. It was like the water a fish has no awareness of, a reality to which she had no alternative. Wallace calls it a “default setting” of the human mind. And he receives support from psychologist Victor Johnston who sees this ‘adaptive illusion’ as a function of evolutionary biology. However, one that doesn’t always serve us well regarding our relationships.
Seeing ourselves as the center is effortless.
It is a reminder, that the “experience of empathizing with another requires deliberate and sustained effort” as Ed Batista puts it.
She was entertaining efforts to transcendent for example by expressing gratitude. But in her effort to see herself from a distance, she was falling back into a perception of herself. One that was built on a split of things into good and bad, happiness and sadness. It probably isn’t too far off to say that in her mind it was leading to worshiping happiness and whatever was good. It is where Wallace explains how everybody worships something but may be better off thinking about what they choose to worship. Just as he describes it, the coachee I was exchanging with was confronted by the sadness she was feeling and the negative sides she was seeing in her life.
The way she was experiencing life made her subject to the things she wanted to avoid and desiring what she was hoping for.
In her way of seeing her life, she couldn’t develop the idea of a possible freedom from what she was subject to. David Foster Wallace’s idea of freedom was still beyond her: “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
Our efforts for individual success can make us blind to the satisfaction and sense of freedom we can experience when acting out of a sense of belonging. The hope that our success will be the answer rarely fulfills itself. We’ll experience it and notice quickly that it isn’t sustainable. An experience this coachee saw as a flaw of her own ability and character.
A way to see her situation differently is also described by Wallace. It may be as simple or complex as to accept that she doesn’t know what others do. In not knowing there is the potential for curiosity and a rich variety between good and bad.
