Transparent Life
They’re Goldfish Now
My kids do not know they are in water, and that’s OK
There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”
—from author David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College
My kids will be here long after I’m gone. That much is evident, but I realize that I don’t even know where “here” will be. For now, it’s New Zealand. To my wife and me, it’s a time and a place in our lives. How we perceive it is framed by all the places we’ve lived before.
But to my children, who don’t remember the two countries they lived in before we moved them here, New Zealand is not a time, nor a place, but their only time and place.
As a parent, my perspectives inform the observations I share with them, yet I recently recognized that if I’m not self-aware, I might make as much sense as an older goldfish.
I love to observe cultural differences. Yes, of course, most of us understand when it goes too far into bigoted stereotyping, but if people and places weren’t different from one…
