This old David Foster Wallace commencement speech has been making the rounds since his suicide last September. I finally got around to reading it, and it struck me immediately that the whole thing was about mindfulness, in the Buddhist sense:

Probably the most dangerous thing about college education, at least in my own case, is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract arguments inside my head instead of simply paying attention to what’s going on right in front of me. Paying attention to what’s going on inside me. As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head. Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal-arts cliché about “teaching you how to think” is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: “Learning how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.” This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

I have no idea if DFW ever chose to describe this “control over how and what you think” as mindfulness, but it’s clear at least from this speech that he thought about it deeply and that it had profound, personal consequences for him. Here are the first and last paragraphs of his speech:

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?”

…

None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma, or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness — awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water.”

Unfortunately, one doesn’t get very far thinking about mindfulness. I know from my own stuttering, occasional meditation that noticing the water that is always around you requires constant practice. It’s why they call it a practice and not a philosophy. Using a little voice in your head as a reminder takes you a very short distance towards actually becoming mindful; what’s required is actual doing, gently, repeatedly.

I’ve never been depressed, so I can’t speak to whether or not mindfulness can serve those who carry that burden. However, DFW had some profound thoughts on the nature of the mind. I can’t help but wonder if he would still be with us if he’d had chance circumstances in his life that would have led him to mindfulness practice.