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The Fish Don’t Talk About the Water

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The Fish Don’t Talk About the Water

In 2005, David Foster Wallace stood in front of a graduating class at Kenyon College and told a small parable. Two young fish are swimming along, and an older fish passes the other way and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on for a bit, and then one of them turns to the other and says, “What the hell is water?”

Wallace’s point wasn’t really about fish. It was about the obvious, ever-present realities that shape our lives so completely that we stop being able to see them at all. The water we swim in is the last thing we notice, precisely because it’s everywhere.

I thought about that fish story recently on a trip to a city I don’t call home. Our guide walked us past arena after arena, his voice rising with real pride — this stadium, that stadium, the new one going up next year. You could hear how much he loved his city in the way he talked about those buildings.

I looked past him at the sidewalks. Tents. Bedrolls. People folded into doorways in the middle of the afternoon. It wasn’t hidden. It wasn’t subtle. It was just — there, the way water is there.

So I asked him: “What about your homeless?”

He got quiet. Almost flinched. “We can’t really talk about that,” he said, and moved on to the next stadium.

We can’t really talk about that.

I’ve turned that sentence over many times since. It wasn’t cruelty in his voice — it was something closer to reflex, like a fish that’s been trained not to notice it’s wet. His city loves its stadiums out loud. Its people sleeping in the cold, it has agreed, silently and collectively, not to see.

And it’s not just his city. Homelessness in this country has climbed toward levels not seen since the Great Depression, and mostly we manage not to talk about it either — except to complain about a tent on a sidewalk we’d rather not look at on our way somewhere else. We build the water. Then we swim in it and call it normal.

Here is the part that should unsettle us, if we let it. This is not a new test, and we are not the first generation to fail parts of it. Ancient Israel’s prophets — Amos, Isaiah, Micah — spent their careers hammering a wealthy, temple-proud nation for the exact same blindness: elaborate worship on one hand, the poor ground into the dust on the other. Rome built magnificent coliseums while its underclass starved outside the gates, and centuries later we tour the ruins and marvel at the architecture without asking who slept in its shadow. Every era gets its stadiums — its games, its monuments, its things to be proud of out loud — and every era has, in its own doorways, a version of what its guides would rather not discuss. The particulars change. The reflex does not.

There are people who’ve given their whole careers to this fight, and right now many of them are losing ground. In 1992, a psychologist named Dr. Sam Tsemberis started a small experiment in New York called Pathways to Housing: give a person an apartment first — before therapy, before sobriety, before anything else is asked of them. It worked. Housing First, as the model came to be known, spread nationwide over the next three decades and became the backbone of federal homelessness policy, credited by researchers as the most effective tool built yet against chronic homelessness.

In 2026, the same federal agency that once championed it moved to gut its funding in favor of “treatment first” programs instead, a shift advocates warned could put more than 170,000 people back on the street. A judge has since blocked part of the rollback, but the funding remains fragile, and shelters are folding while they wait. In one Maryland county, a permanent-housing program lost its federal grant in January; a small Episcopal church down the road gave its entire Christmas offering — about $15,000 — just to cover eleven families’ rent for one more month. That’s the fight up close: careful work built over three decades, surviving month to month on a church’s collection plate.

Wallace saw a version of this same blindness, from a different angle entirely — not policy, but attention. Near the end of that commencement address, he circled back to his fish and told the graduates plainly: “This is water. This is water.” He wasn’t talking about homelessness. He was talking about all of it — every obvious, unbearable thing that hides in plain sight until someone insists on naming it.

Francis of Assisi understood something about this reflex that still cuts. He didn’t organize a committee to study poverty from a comfortable distance. He walked toward the leper on the road — the person his whole city had agreed to look past — and embraced him. Not as a strategy. As a correction to his own blindness. He had to become willing to see the water before he could do anything about it at all.

Fish Don’t Talk About Water Workbook

Awareness is the first domain of Spiritual Emotional Intelligence for exactly this reason. You cannot repent of what you cannot see. You cannot love your neighbor if your neighbor has quietly become part of the scenery — background, infrastructure, something you’ve stopped registering as human. The tour guide’s embarrassment wasn’t a character flaw. It was a diagnosis, and it’s one most of us carry in some form, about some doorway in some city we’ve decided not to look at too closely.

Every tradition I’ve spent my life inside says some version of the same hard thing: a society is judged, in the end, not by its monuments but by how it treats the ones with no power to demand better treatment. Not by its stadiums. By its doorways. History keeps handing down that report card, generation after generation, and we keep being surprised that it’s still being graded.

Where This Meets You:

Somewhere in your own city, there’s a version of that tour guide’s silence — a thing everyone has quietly agreed not to mention. You already know what it is. The only question Wallace’s parable really leaves us with isn’t whether the water is there. It’s whether we’re willing to notice we’re wet.

Peace and every good.

 

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ and author of The Mystical Seeker, writing at the intersection of emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and contemplative spirituality. He and his wife Lynette help individuals and organizations grow from the inside out.”

The Intelligence You Weren’t Taught

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She could name what she was feeling before most people in the room even knew they had feelings. She could read a tense conversation like a map, tracking the undercurrents, sensing what was unspoken. By every measure the research celebrates, her emotional intelligence was high. And yet, somewhere beneath all of that competence, something was restless. Something that didn’t have a name yet.

I think about her often. About the particular quality of her restlessness — not the kind that suggests incompleteness, but the kind that suggests there is more. A country just beyond the border of the map you’ve been given.

Emotional intelligence gave her a better map. What she was reaching for was a different kind of knowing altogether.

What EQ Gets Right — And Where It Stops

We have built our practice at spirit of EQ around the conviction that emotional intelligence changes lives. It changes how leaders show up, how teams hold conflict, how individuals navigate the interior terrain of their own experience. The research is clear, and decades of work with clients has confirmed it: people who develop their EQ are more self-aware, more empathic, more effective in their relationships, more resilient when the ground shifts beneath them.

But here is the honest edge of that map: emotional intelligence is a technology. A profound one. A necessary one. And yet a technology is only as generative as the spirit that animates it. You can have extraordinary self-awareness and still not know what your life is for. You can understand others deeply and still feel unmoored from any larger belonging. You can manage your emotions with great skill and still find, at the end of the day, that something essential is asking to be heard.

EQ maps the terrain. It does not always tell you why the terrain matters, or to what — or to whom — you ultimately belong.

That is where Lynette’s question begins.

Lynette’s Question — And the Research That Followed

Lynette Vaive has spent her career at the intersection of emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and spiritual formation. Her doctoral research — a Doctor of Ministry focused on Spiritual Emotional Intelligence — grew from a question she kept encountering in the field: what happens when emotional intelligence is not enough? What is the deeper layer that some people access and others don’t? And can it be named, taught, practiced?

The framework she developed is called Spiritual Emotional Intelligence, or SEQ. It is not a replacement for EQ — it is a deepening of it, a third dimension that EQ by itself cannot fully reach. SEQ is organized around three domains: Awareness, Belonging, and Insight.

Awareness, in the SEQ framework, is more than self-knowledge. It is the capacity to be present to your own inner life with honesty and without flinching — to notice not just what you feel, but what your feelings are pointing toward. It is the kind of attention the contemplative traditions have always cultivated, and that modern life consistently works against.

Belonging is the recognition that we are not isolated selves navigating a competitive landscape. We are embedded — in community, in creation, in something that holds us whether we attend to it or not. SEQ invites us to notice that embeddedness, to feel it, to let it shape how we move through the world. This is the domain that changes how leaders relate to their teams, how partners relate to each other, how any of us relate to the stranger across the table.

Insight is the capacity to integrate what Awareness reveals and what Belonging grounds — to let that integration become wisdom that actually changes behavior, not just understanding. Insight, in the SEQ framework, is the difference between knowing and living differently because you know.

Within these three domains, Lynette’s research maps nine tiles — specific capacities that together describe what Spiritual Emotional Intelligence looks like in practice. But the framework breathes most fully not as a model to be mastered, but as a territory to be inhabited.

What Changes When You Go Deeper

I think of the woman at the beginning of this reflection. Her EQ gave her a map of her inner landscape. What SEQ names — what her restlessness was reaching toward — was the landscape itself. The felt sense that she belonged to something larger than her own competence. The capacity to let that belonging inform not just her behavior but her becoming.

Howard Thurman, the theologian and mystic who shaped the thinking of the civil rights movement and whose work has long been an anchor for me, wrote about the inner life with a clarity that few have matched. He understood that the most significant work any person does happens not on the stage of public action, but in the quiet interior where the self is formed and reformed in relationship to what is deepest and truest. He did not use the language of emotional intelligence. But he was describing its spiritual root.

SEQ is, in some ways, a contemporary articulation of what contemplatives have always known: that the quality of our presence to others depends on the quality of our presence to ourselves, and that the quality of our presence to ourselves depends on something we did not manufacture. A ground. A source. A belonging that precedes our effort.

In community and organizational settings, SEQ changes the texture of everything. Teams that develop Awareness together begin to notice the emotional undercurrents they used to ignore. Communities that practice Belonging begin to hold conflict differently — not as a threat to be managed but as an invitation to go deeper. Leaders who cultivate Insight find that their decisions come from a different place, quieter and more rooted than the reactive center most of us operate from by default.

Something shifts. Not dramatically, not all at once. But truly.

The Deeper Layer Is Not Out of Reach

She is still in the room, the woman from the beginning of this reflection. And now she has a name for what she was reaching toward. Not a label that fixes it, but a language that opens it — a way of attending to the Awareness, Belonging, and Insight that were always present in her, asking to be cultivated.

That is what the SEQ framework offers. Not a program, but a practice. Not mastery, but an orientation — a way of asking better questions of your own interior life and the lives you share with others.

Spiritual Emotional Intelligence  Reflection Guide— Three Domains, Three Questions

The map was never the territory. But there is a territory. And it is worth inhabiting.

If this stirred something in you, we would be glad to have you join the ongoing conversation at spirit of EQ — on Substack, in our Mighty Networks community, or through the work we do directly with individuals and organizations.

Peace and every good.