water and shared water
Kimberly Bunker, MFA
Ghostwriter & Book Coach | Memoirs and fiction with themes of mental health, relationships, & spirituality
One night eleven years ago, my best friend came over for dinner. We were chatting along as usual when I began chopping a sweet potato, and she interrupted herself to say, “What are you doing?”
I stopped. “What do you mean?”
“The pieces are so uneven,” she said (not critically–just neutrally, surprised, curious). “You’re just, like, chopping at random.”
I looked at my pile of differently sized wedges. “This is how you cut sweet potatoes,” I said.?
She shook her head, took the knife, and proceeded to show me how she cuts sweet potatoes: slowly, into tiny, perfectly even cubes.?
“But why?” I said. “Your way takes forever.”
“But they’ll cook evenly,” she said.
We went on to list the various merits of each method, both of us marveling at the reality that our way was not the only way—maybe not even the standard way.?
In my case, I loved that she just said exactly what she was thinking so candidly, even rerouting the conversation entirely to crack this mystery, to bring light to the things that were in darkness, to validate what she was seeing. (To me this was beyond radical; it was inconceivable. It had never before occurred to me that it was possible.)
In her case, she told me years later that seeing me chop vegetables any old way, surrounded by notes and drawings from my first novel taped all over my walls, she felt like she was in a “wonderland.” (her words).?
“You can do that?” we’d both thought.?
There's a story made famous by David Foster Wallace: an older fish swims by two younger fish and says, “Water’s mighty fine today, ain’t it, boys?” and swims away. One young fish turns to the other and says, “What’s water?”
It's the things we do—the way we think, act, reason, manage emotions, cook vegetables, etc–that are so obvious or second-nature to us that we don’t name them.
Sometimes, we don’t even know about them.?
Yet they’re the things that are shaping our experience.
Sometimes this water is shared—culturally, within a family, or by virtue of being human.
Sometimes the water is personal. Our individual habits, our knee-jerk ways of thinking. The things we assume are universal (if we know they’re there at all), yet really they’re specific to us.
While I was researching for my second novel, which is about a teenager who hears voices, I read about all sorts of variations in cognition: people without an internal monologue; people who can’t visualize. As terms like #ADHD and #neurodivergence become more mainstream, we’re learning that not everyone perceives time passing the same. Not everyone has the same spatial awareness. Some people can’t focus in certain conditions. Some have difficulty identifying their emotions. As a culture, we’re beginning to accept that we all have our own personal “water.”?
Naturally, this has myriad implications for how we can live our lives in more harmony. When we understand our own “water,” we can work with it, not against it. (Sometimes that’s easier said than done.)
It also has implications for those of us who write.?
I just read a great nonfiction book called Random Family by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. In the afterward, LeBlanc says the protagonist’s neighbors asked her “Why you writing about Coco? She regular.” Coco grew up in a poor area of the Bronx during the War on Drugs, and had 5 kids before age 21. She’s not regular to me. I loved reading about even her most mundane days.?
Your “regular” is not my “regular.”
So many people believe their lives aren’t interesting enough to write about. That their experiences aren’t “enough,” or that they need to be more dramatic to be worth writing down.
(This is often true about our talents, too. We take for granted the things that come naturally to us, believing that they come naturally to everybody. But often, therein lie our strengths.)
“Water doesn’t try to be wet!” shouted a random guy I met once on a hiking trail in New Mexico. “It just is! Cultivate! Cultivate your inner goodness!”?
At the time, I found it funny. Now I find it wise.?
Water doesn’t try to be wet. We don’t have to try to be interesting or original. We already are.?
If we can learn to understand and value our “water,” we will find that we have many valuable things to say.
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If you're curious about writing a book, talk to me. I'm a #ghostwriter and #bookcoach who helps people tell their stories in imaginative and meaningful ways. More at kimberlybunker.com.
#writingamemoir #writingoutloud
A crisis counselor, philosopher, poet, freelance journalist, community organizer, and human rights advocate based in Rochester, NY.
4 个月One last reflection on your piece that feels worth sharing: When I was teaching philosophy, I used a thought experiment to convey the problem of epistemological relativism. I would ask students to spend 10 minutes writing down all the different objects a first grader might see when they look up at the starry sky. Then, I had them list all the ways a professional astronomer sees the same sky. The lists were very different, but I asked them to consider which sky was more real. At that point, the conversation became more interesting. I then asked, which sky is more accurate? Which one is more truthful? As we get older and more acculturated, we tend to prioritize expertise and knowledge, viewing them as more authentic and valuable than observations made by children. But what about the question of what things truly are, as opposed to what we say about them? Can both perspectives be equally valuable? Can both viewpoints on the sky be true in their own way? Is there one sky or 7 billion different skies?
A crisis counselor, philosopher, poet, freelance journalist, community organizer, and human rights advocate based in Rochester, NY.
4 个月When we write, our minds are open to being changed by the act itself. Writing becomes a willing confession of our ignorance, prejudices, neuroses, and traumas. We do this because we’ve accepted these parts as aspects of who we are, no longer at war with our nature. Writing isn’t an act of therapy; it’s an act of confession
A crisis counselor, philosopher, poet, freelance journalist, community organizer, and human rights advocate based in Rochester, NY.
4 个月Your post sparks so much curiosity and resonates on multiple levels. As I was reading, I immediately thought of the plot of American Fiction, a brilliant satire that explores what it means to write from an authentic center rather than trying to align with society’s shifting center of gravity. We are always relevant, yet society is constantly in flux. If we change ourselves to meet society's standards, we remain in perpetual flux, uncertain, disillusioned, and unable to speak with authority. We’ll never truly be the authors of our own stories. Training our minds to see the 'water' we’re immersed in feels like a mindfulness practice; the more we examine how and why we think as we do, the more we can identify our cognitive distortions. Maybe one definition of a good artist is someone who can identify and confront their biases while accepting them as natural parts of being human, and who then creatively uses these biases to challenge the systems that perpetuate them in society.