1 – This is Air

There’s a story about two young fish swimming along when they meet an older fish going the other way. “Morning, boys,” he says. “How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a while until one turns to the other and asks, “What’s water?”

David Foster Wallace crafted his 2005 Kenyon College speech around this little parable. His point was that the most important realities are often the hardest to see because they’re all around us. To avoid sleepwalking through life, he said, we have to keep reminding ourselves:

This is water.

This is water.

Sometimes we choose to pay attention. Sometimes life chooses for us.

I remember Brian, a farmer, the kind I knew from my youth—down-to-earth, friendly, and sunburned. Vivian and I met him and his wife in Harare, and they invited us to visit them on their farm in northern Zimbabwe. As we walked the fields with him one afternoon, Vivian mentioned that we had hired a n’anga, a witch doctor, in Harare to recover her stolen backpack, after the police proved useless. The n’anga said the spell would take three days to work. Unfortunately, we had to leave Harare after two days.

I chimed in, saying it was probably all a waste of money.

Brian laughed. “I use witch doctors all the time to get stolen things back.”

“You believe in spells?” Vivian asked.

“I do, because I’ve seen them work. When the n’anga is right there, and the thief sees him casting the spell, you can understand what’s happening.” He shrugged. “Some of the longer-distance stuff isn’t so easy to explain. Living here, the more you see, the less you know.”

Throughout a year backpacking from Cairo to Cape Town—and ever since—the world has whispered:

This is air.

This is air.

I’ll share the journey every Thursday. Join us.