“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.” (Frost 1920). Frost’s famous poem, “The Road Not Taken,” is known by almost everyone, and it is also well known that the poem is about the choices we make in life affecting the rest of our life. Wallace, like Frost, also tried to portray the importance of our choices in his speech “This is Water”. In “This is Water” Wallace is repetitive with his use of the word choice in his speech. Wallace really tries to hit us with the idea that our choices can change our day to day routine and make living better. Wallace’s use of choice throughout creates an emphasis that truly makes us wonder why he uses the word. Which is why 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 speech, 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 choice is in the third paragraph of the speech. In this paragraph, 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 quote, Wallace uses choice to bring attention to the fact that we are stuck in a self-centered lifestyle and we can’t get out unless we physically make ourselves. What he means is that our choices are made by us but we are naturally self-centered. Due to our prior experience we make it seem in our minds that our beliefs and ideas can’t be wrong. But Wallace suggests something different. He suggest that we in fact are wrong a lot. We can get out of this though. He means to show us that this world has many people with many experiences and that we can’t always be right. If we just look at things through other lenses we will see that there are many ways to experience one thing and our minds just create one that focuses on ourselves.

Wallace’s second use of the word choice in the speech 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.” The point all of this together is that he is using choice to bring attention to the fact that our lives seem terrible and our situations appears to be not in our favor, but 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 may 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. He wants us to realize that though our self-centered way of life may be easier but it could also be our downfall because it makes us miserable. If we do this our lives may get a little better because we are no longer going crazy over the little things because our little things will seem insignificant compared to what others are going through.

Wallace 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. However when we do choose to overcome this idea that we are the center of everything we can change our whole lives. If we get past our distorted view on our life and experiences and see other ways of thinking 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 to overcome our self-centered way of thinking is what could put us out of our misery. Those lines, that traffic, everything we consider a nuisance could seem like nothing. I believe he wants us to see that we just have to see it that way and realize hey other people may being having it worst, and in comparison having to deal with traffic is nothing.

The next time Wallace 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. He uses choice to bring to our attention that 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. He wants us to see that there are drastically different views on one experience. He shows this in his 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 like the way Wallace wants us to, 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.