What’s Water?

Two young fish are swimming through the ocean.

An older fish swims past them.

“Morning, boys,” he says. “How’s the water?”

The two fish continue swimming.

A few moments later, one turns to the other.

“What the hell is water?”

It’s a tiny story.

Almost nothing happens.

And yet, somehow, it opens a trapdoor beneath your entire life.

Because the water is the thing you don’t notice.

It is the environment you have always lived inside.

It is so close, so constant, so fundamental to your existence that you stop experiencing it as something separate from you.

You don’t think about water.

You simply swim.

And perhaps consciousness is like that.

We experience the world through consciousness, but rarely stop to examine the consciousness through which we are experiencing the world.

We see our thoughts.

We see our emotions.

We see our circumstances.

We see other people.

We see our problems.

But what is doing the seeing?

That is where things get strange.

And profound.

Because the moment you try to stand outside consciousness and look at consciousness itself, language begins to collapse.

The mind is trying to use itself to examine itself.

The eye is trying to look directly at the eye.

The fish is trying to see the water.

And this may be one of the great challenges of being human:

We are capable of becoming aware of the very thing we are immersed in, but we have to deliberately step back to do it.

Most of us don’t.

We live inside our thinking.

A thought appears:

I’m not good enough.

And we don’t experience it as a thought.

We experience it as truth.

This relationship should have worked.

And suddenly the past becomes the present.

I need to achieve more.

And we mistake the voice of ambition for the voice of our deepest desire.

This is just who I am.

And an interpretation becomes an identity.

We are swimming in the water without knowing there is water.

But something extraordinary happens when you begin to notice.

You can have a thought without being the thought.

You can experience fear without becoming fear.

You can notice a story without believing the story.

You can feel grief without allowing grief to define the boundaries of your future.

You can observe yourself reacting and ask:

What is happening here?

That question creates space.

And sometimes a millimetre of space is enough to change a life.

Because consciousness gives us the possibility of moving from being inside the experience to observing the experience.

From I am angry

to

I notice anger is here.

From I’m a failure

to

I’m noticing a thought that I’m a failure.

From My life is going nowhere

to

I’m noticing the story I’m telling myself about where my life is going.

The circumstances haven’t necessarily changed.

But your relationship with them has.

And that is the beginning of freedom.

Perhaps this is why powerful questions can be so transformative.

A powerful question doesn’t necessarily give you an answer.

It changes the position from which you are looking.

It takes you out of the water for a moment.

What am I not seeing?

What am I assuming is true?

What would I see if I wasn’t trying to protect myself?

What do I actually want?

What is this experience here to teach me?

What would make this an extraordinary conversation?

The question interrupts the automatic.

It creates a moment of awareness.

And in that moment, something becomes possible that wasn’t possible one second earlier:

You can see the water.

Maybe that’s what consciousness is for.

Not simply to experience life.

But to become aware of the way we are experiencing life.

To notice the invisible assumptions beneath our decisions.

The patterns beneath our reactions.

The stories beneath our suffering.

The identity beneath our behaviour.

And eventually, perhaps, to discover that some of the things we thought were solid were only habits of perception.

The water was always there.

We just couldn’t see it.

And maybe the next chapter of your life doesn’t require you to swim harder.

Maybe it requires you to stop for a moment.

Look around.

And ask:

What is the water I’m swimming in?

Because the moment you can see the water,

you are no longer completely trapped by it.

You have begun to wake up.