This Is Water, A Reset Worth Repeating

Every new year I do the same thing.
I sit down and watch David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech, This Is Water.

Not because it’s trendy. Not because it’s motivational in the loud sense. I do it because it quietly resets my head.

The speech isn’t about success, ambition, creativity, or winning. It’s about attention. Where it goes. How easily it slips. How much of life happens while we’re distracted, irritated, convinced we’re right.

Wallace talks about the ordinary moments, traffic, grocery store lines, the low-level frustrations that stack up and slowly shape how we move through the world. His point is simple and uncomfortable. Meaning isn’t found by default. It has to be chosen. Again and again.

That’s why it’s a reset for me.

At the start of every year there’s pressure to add things. New goals. New systems. New habits. Bigger plans. But This Is Water does the opposite. It strips things down. It asks a better question.

What am I actually paying attention to?

Most of the time we’re running on autopilot. We assume our perspective is the truth. We assume our irritation is justified. We assume our stress is unavoidable. Wallace reminds us that this way of seeing isn’t mandatory. It’s a setting, and settings can be changed.

That idea hits harder the older I get.

Work, family, creative projects, responsibility, it all piles up. You can move through it clenched, defensive, impatient. Or you can notice that you’re choosing that posture without realizing it.

That’s the water.

At Casella Creative, this matters more than any new tool or strategy. Creativity doesn’t disappear because of a lack of talent. It disappears because attention gets scattered. Because everything feels urgent. Because we stop seeing the work as something we get to do and start treating it like something happening to us.

The reset isn’t about grinding harder. It’s about seeing clearly.

Seeing the client as a person instead of a problem.
Seeing the process instead of just the deadline.
Seeing the day as something lived, not something survived.

Wallace doesn’t give answers. He gives responsibility. He reminds us that awareness is work. Choosing how you think is work. But it’s the only work that actually changes the experience of your life.

So I start the year there. Not with resolutions. With attention.

What am I assuming today
What story am I telling myself
What would happen if I chose a different lens

That’s the reset.

If you haven’t watched This Is Water in a while, give it another look. Not as inspiration. As calibration.

Because the things that matter most rarely announce themselves. They’re already there. Quiet. Ordinary. Waiting to be noticed.

That’s the water.