Seeing The Water
Have you heard this David Foster Wallace story?
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?”.
It’s great, right? I think we can all relate to it.
Many of us grow up in environments where we were not taught how to see the water and yet, as changemakers, it’s one of the most valuable skills we can have.
The water, depending on context, can be many different things: it can be as personal as family dynamics, or as large and systemic as capitalism or supremacy culture.
One of the first ways I learnt to see the water was travel. I spent a lot of my 20’s backpacking, and I was fortunate to go places as diverse as the Colombian Amazon, the Wakhan Valley, and the Arctic Circle of Norway.
My family never fully understood my love of travel - especially to more remote places - but as someone with a non-traditional education, it became a way of learning for me.
Travel taught me the many different ways of being human.
It showed me patterns.
And it taught me how to see the water.
Because in each of these places I saw the patterns of our interconnection. The shared love we all have for our communities & family, music and art, our shared questioning and searching for something divine.
But also the patterns & interconnection of injustice.
The burning of the Amazon isn’t an isolated problem of South America. It’s directly tied to a global economic system that requires infinite growth, that is founded on our disconnection from the Earth and each other.
The suffering in parts of the Global South isn’t a “them” problem; it’s deeply entangled with neocolonial policies and the power politics of the Global North - systems that depend on extraction, domination, and disposability.
And even the internal struggles so many changemakers experience - burnout, perfectionism, shame-cycles, imposter syndrome - aren’t just personal failings. They’re symptoms of a culture that isolates us, making us believe that systemic injustices are just individual problems to fix rather than collective patterns to transform.
They’re a product of a toxic culture, that likes to individualise and otherise systemic injustice.
As changemakers, I believe our work is in learning to see the water of our culture, and learning to recognise patterns.
It’s a skill we can develop - not just through travel but through deep listening, community engagement and studying histories of resistance.
It’s also something we can learn by asking better questions, ones that shift perception - you’ll find a few below to help you get started.
Reflection Prompts
There are many ways to ‘see the water’ we’re swimming in, including self-inquiry. Self-inquiry is a tool that allows us to reflect on what shapes our world and experiences from a different perspective. Try asking the following questions:
Who or what benefits when I feel this way (eg, exhausted, powerless etc)? Consider all possible answers to this question including power structures, cultural stories, organisations, individuals, beliefs etc.
Who or what goes unchallenged? Who or what misses out?
What pattern might there be here, where can I see this story in culture?
What would feel liberatory right now?
What does it mean to learn from, rather than extract from, the experiences of others?
