How’s the water?

This is the post I should have started with, but (perhaps unsurprisingly) due to running around, packing, repacking, etc. over the past week, I didn’t quite get to it! I’m at my gate preparing to board, so I can finally start to relax and enjoy this journey! In the morning, I’ll be in London.

I titled this blog based on a quote from David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, USA, which opens:

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?”

The point of the story is to illustrate how the things and phenomena that we experience constantly, those surroundings from which we are never removed, become invisible to us. This holds true in a myriad of situations. It’s why children don’t immediately understand the concept of air being not nothing; until they feel a breeze or see their belly swell when they take a breath, or, in other words, until they experience a change in the state of the air around them, they are unaware of its presence.

The same is true of culture. Participation in only a small number of cultures (perhaps, one’s neighborhood, workplace, country, etc.) daily, without any pause in being steeped in the norms, customs, language, and values of those cultures paradoxically begets ignorance of that system. It also begets complacency. When one experiences only the constancy of home, one’s willingness and ability to identify problems and strive for change is inevitably lessened. It takes effort to step out of one’s culture in a mostly sedentary world. I often get the sense that Americans stand out in our general unwillingness to make that effort.

I titled my blog “What is water?’ because my primary purpose for this trip is to get out of American culture. My goal is to experience other Western cultures (exploring the East will have to be another backpacking trip) so that I may better understand the nature of my home country and how the U.S. fits in with the rest of the world. I took an Anthropology course in college titled “The U.S. as a Foreign Country” and in it turned an anthropological lens towards American history. I see abroad travel and conversations with non-Americans as a more current, personal, and subjective supplement to that course.

The other goal for this trip is simply to challenge myself. For the next two(ish) months, I am a Solo Female Backpacker. It will be an exercise in independence, self-sufficiency, resiliance, and adventure. It will be up to me alone to make the experience everything and anything I want it to be. It will be up to me to find travel companions when I don’t feel like being solo for a few days. I think I’m up for the challenge.

I hope to keep up with this blog to share my adventures, revelations, travel tips, and whatever else I encounter that I just can’t experience alone.

I’m currently in Toronto and just got my Toronto>Halifax>London leg changed to a direct flight to London! Off to a pretty good start, I’d say. 🙂