I’ve written about David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water" before. Today, a friend shared it again on Facebook, and I stopped and listened to it, and thought about the coming election.

There is just over a week until election day and I am exhausted. I door knock, put out campaign signs, work on mailers, talk with voters, all while trying to care for my family and do my regular job. It is a choice I have made. David Foster Wallace talks about choices in his speech.

The point is that petty, 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, I’m going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food-shop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way

This is what voting is about. Yes, all the crappy negative campaign ads on television are annoying. The phone calls, and the direct mail, and having a politician walk up your driveway to shake your hand can be annoying. It is easy to get lost the rants online from our partisan friends. We can get caught in thinking it is all about ourselves. Even worse, we can go vote for people based on how well they will defend our petty little lives and biases. Or, we can make a conscious decision.

If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important — if you want to operate on your default-setting — then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying. 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. Not that that mystical stuff’s necessarily true: The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.

Think, pay attention, seek compassion and love, and then, get out and vote.