"This is Water."

From the top:

• Welcome back, friends.

• Happy Sunday.

• Listen time: 22 minutes

• Meme theme: nada

See you out there.

“If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about the value of the totally obvious.”

Forgive my delay. I’ve been in the woods for the last 5 days on a backpacking trip with a few wise friends and 4 high school senior guys about to launch into college. What a rich time.

Lots of our time was spent helping them reflect on, and reflecting on ourselves, who they (we) are, and where they (we) are going in life. And lots of time spent on the trail in the Grayson Highlands.

To the coasting mind, this seems like an obvious answer: “My name is _ and I am going to college.”

During one night of a particularly torrent rain, lying alone in my tent, I was looking through my downloaded podcasts on Spotify waiting it out and I came back to this commencement speech that David Foster Wallace gave in 2005 called, “This is Water.”

It is beautiful and so fun to listen to. It addresses this insanely hard and rigirous way of thinking: how to think about the most obvious things in our lives - the givens - like a fish thinks about water.

Watch this. Question it. Send me an email and tell me what think.

Also…

Next week is issue 20. I’m gonna give away something away (maybe a 🌮) if you send Deep Loafe to a friend to subscribies.

Welp, have a great week. Thanks for listening.

Andrew