Kindling a Fire “How’s the Water?”

By Cincinnati Country Day Head of School Rob Zimmerman ‘98

[The following excerpt is adapted from Rob Zimmerman’s graduation address given at Cincinnati Country Day School’s Commencement Ceremony on May 31, 2025.]

There’s an old story about two young fish swimming along when they encounter an older fish who nods and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two younger fish swim on for a bit, and then one turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

This story was made famous by the late David Foster Wallace in one of the best commencement addresses ever given, 20 years ago this spring at Kenyon College. I reference it not to repeat its moral (though it’s a good one) but to press it a step further.

Wallace’s point is that the most important realities in life are often the hardest to see. Not because they are hidden, but because they are everywhere. The air you breathe. The assumptions you carry. The flood tide of information on which you swim every day. As George Orwell once said, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

And so, as you leave the fishbowl of Country Day, I want to offer a simple piece of advice: pay attention.

That’s it. Two simple words. Because what you pay attention to is what your life becomes. It is the content of your consciousness, the architecture of your ambition. It is, quite literally, what your brain rewires itself around.

Now this would be a banal, perhaps even hopeful observation, if we lived in a world that treated your attention with the same reverence I’m urging you to. But we don’t. We live in a society that hunts your attention, that slices it into salable units and feeds it back to you in the form of distractions, tribal identities, outrage, and algorithmically curated entertainment.

This makes it very easy to float along without noticing your surroundings, to unconsciously accept what David Foster Wallace called the “default settings” of life. But his fellow author and educator Neil Postman warned that idle acceptance of life’s currents could lead to something more troubling: amusement, which he defined as the state of being entertained into a cheery and well-lit ignorance.

Postman presciently predicted the future by contrasting George Orwell’s vision in 1984 with Aldous Huxley’s vision in Brave New World. Postman wrote:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

Incredibly, Postman warned of “man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions” 40 years ago, not in our modern world of social media and artificial intelligence, where attention has waned and reading has eroded even further.

Now I recognize that graduation speeches are meant to be the happy moments when I compare your future to a sunrise and your potential to the stars and tell you that you can do anything. And you can, it’s true. But rather than promising you the world, I ask you instead: will you notice it?

Will you notice the beauty in an ordinary sunrise? Will you notice the stillness in the stars tonight? Will you sit with a piece of music long enough to notice that perfect harmony in the last measure, or will you read a book with enough focus to notice that beautifully crafted sentence on page 800?

I’d like to think so. And the best reason to be optimistic about your future came on May 16, at the seniors’ last bell. You gathered in the Upper School Commons to sing songs, to share memories, and to wait for one last ding of the bell. At 3:19, in that final silence just before the bell, I saw you all fully present, alive to every possibility, attuned to each classmate. There was an electricity that crackled through that place that only comes from immersive and attentive human connection.

As you leave CCDS, keep that feeling: fully present, alive to each other, unmediated by any technology. It will require a constant struggle, but it’s worth it. In a distracted world, attention is a superpower. To truly attend to something is to resist the reduction of your life to expensive algorithms and cheap slogans. It is to claim your consciousness as your own.

So yes, by all means, go chase your dreams. Shoot for the stars. Fall in love. But more than that, choose what you pay attention to.Because whatever you choose, it will choose you back. And those choices are what make up a life. Nothing more.

Start by noticing the water you swim in every day. This is it. This moment is it. The person next to you, the faces of loved ones in the audience, the wind rustling the sun-dappled trees overhead, this is water, this is all water. Hopefully you’ve noticed it with the fierce urgency of your last bell. Because you’ve been blessed to swim in some beautiful waters here at Country Day.

But now it’s time to send you off to sea. So off you go. Have fun. Do the reading. Take care of each other. And pay attention. I know that everyone in the Country Day community will be paying attention to you – no, more than that – we will be holding you in our hearts as you go forth into the wide ocean of adulthood.

I can’t wait to see you again soon. And when I do, I hope you’ll have a ready answer for the question you already know I’m going to ask you: how’s the water?