Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Frost’s famous poem, “The Road Not Taken,” is known by almost everyone, and it is also well known that it’s about the choices we make in life affecting the rest of it. Wallace, like Frost, also tried to portray this in his speech “This is Water”. In this is water he is repetitive with his use of the word choice in his speech. He really tries to hit us with the idea that our choices can change our day to day routine and make living better. His use of the words choice or choosing many times throughout the speech, coupled with the use of choice or choosing at key points in the story, is why I believe that choices and their effect on our lives and everyone else’s is the central theme of his speech.

Wallace’s first use of the word is in the third paragraph of the speech he says, “This is not a matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting”, In this paragraph Wallace speaks of the automatic virtues we have, and how we’ve been hardwired since birth to believe these are the way the world is. But Wallace says it’s our choice, we go through life experiencing things and though we think these experiences have only one way of interpretation, others may experience the same thing and come out with completely new virtue. Wallace calls this our natural self-centeredness, and that it’s completely automatic due to us thinking that our way is the right way. He goes on to say that it’s our choice to get over this self-centered way of thinking and explore every way of thinking in order to expand our choices.

 In his second use of the word choice in the speech he says, “Frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to,… because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me.” In this paragraph he goes on about the self-centeredness of our automatic choices. He says we automatically think that everyone is in our way and everything is an obstacle making our life worse, and he goes on for another paragraph saying the same thing practically and then he says, “Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do-except that thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be a choice…. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations.”,  all of this together means that though our lives seem terrible and our situations appears to be not in our favor, we can take a step back and explore others’ lives in these situations. We can look at life and choose a different attitude we can choose to see that others have it worse and we can choose to get over our self-centered thought process of the world is me and everyone else is in my way. He says we can instead choose to see that that person in the car in front of us could be driving slowly because they’ve been in and accident instead of us going by our default and choosing to believe that they are in our way and though one choice is easier the other choice might just help us be more content and a little saner in our day to day routines.

He goes on and says, “…It takes will and mental effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently...”, what he means is that it’s a difficult task to overcome our self-centered thoughts because all our lives we are taught to be this way, but when we do choose to overcome it we can change our whole lives and all of a sudden we can choose to see that those people in our way might be in more trouble than us and that we in fact could be in their way. Our choice could change our thoughts and our lives by getting rid of our self-centeredness and instead making us more compassionate to others. 

The next time he uses choice he talks about is worshipping, he says, “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship”, he then goes on to say that these things we choose to worship make us and can bring us down a bad path. Our choice of worship may seem like its helping, but it may in fact be hurting others or hurting yourself. In terms of religion if you’re an extremist in any religion, it hurts everybody by taking people’s rights away or causing hatred were there doesn’t have to be. In terms of objects or lifestyles, the pursuit of one of those might hurt others or yourself. If you choose money the pursuit of it might make you ignore your health or friends and family. If you choose to worship power you might lose yourself in the pursuit of getting to the top. No matter what you choose you have to make sure that you also have the ability to step back from you’re ideals and see that everybody doesn’t see it that way and this will allow you to realize that your way is right for you but not right for others.

If we take all these uses together and look at them it is clear that Wallace is trying to get across that we as humans are naturally self-centered and that it’s automatic and we can’t do anything about it. Our experiences make us this way, but if we choose to look at things, and think about experiences differently and see it in another perspective we can truly change our lives. He wants us to take a step back and think of what’s going on and to see other ways to look at it and see that there are drastically different views he shows this in this quote “. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars-compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.”. And if we think this way he thinks that all of a sudden our lives won’t be all about ourselves, we will be able to see that others have problems too. Our experiences lead to many different roads with many different outcomes that we choose from. The roads we choose make us and the roads others choose make them but just because we take different paths doesn’t mean we have to be self-centered and only think of ourselves. If we learn to understand every path of choices we can choose the best outcome and in turn make our lives and other people’s lives better as an outcome. In the end whatever road we choose makes us who we are and that makes all the difference