This is Water

This article gave a very interesting perspective on the on what it means to liberal arts education, the idea of teaching students how to think had never really made sense to me. As Wallace said in the beginning I had always thought that I knew how to think. I always thought I had always earned pretty good grades and was accepted into a competitive college therefore I must be able to think. Later when he talks about how to think being a way of actually saying to control how you think or what you think about made a lot more sense to me. If this is the true meaning of a liberal arts education I think I could really benefit from one. I always suffer from a wandering mind; I can never stay on a single train of thought for more than a couple of minutes before my mind is somewhere else.

Most of the article made sense to me up until the last couple sentences where the author says “This is Water” twice. I understand that he is trying to close with a statement that ties into his parable from the first sentence but I am confused about what it means.  I think he is trying to say “life is what it is and is,” or it is what you make of it. This is how I translated the ending but I am not sure that I am on the right track with that way of thinking.