We like to think of ourselves as self-made and self-sufficient, conquering our days through sheer wit and grit. For the most part, we are wrong. Moment by moment, we are held by innumerable relationships and systems that operate largely outside our awareness.
Watch a toddler insist, “I do it myself,” wrestling a shoe onto the wrong foot. Their confidence depends on an invisible foundation of food, rest, protection, and caregiving. Humanity runs on the same arrangement, scaled up almost past comprehension.
Consider water: This ordinary substance keeps our bodies running, cycling through clouds, rivers, and living bodies across time. Some fraction of your water glass may have passed through a dinosaur. We drink it daily without a flicker of wonder because it is reliably there.
Here lies a condition of being human: We commonly disregard what sustains us until it becomes uncertain or disappears.
Meet Tefnut
Ancient Egyptian mythology tells this story through Tefnut, goddess of moisture and precipitation, one of the Ennead of Heliopolis, and the primordial pair from which earth and sky emerge (Johnson, 2019).
At some point, she gets furious and leaves Egypt. The texts are unclear about why she is upset, though through a modern lens, anyone who has done load-bearing, thankless work might recognize her anger immediately.
She flees in the form of a lioness, taking Egypt’s moisture with her (Aful & Osei, 2020). In modern language, we might call this boundary-setting. Without her, the rain stops, the land turns to desert, and the people grieve what they’ve lost.
Thoth, the god of wisdom, is sent after her. He persuades her to return by granting her an honorific title. The rain returns and people throw a festival in her name.
Tefnut can be understood as the embodiment of the life-giving conditions we take for granted.
Forgetting and Habituating
Why do we so easily overlook what holds us up?
Habituation is a process by which our response to a repeated, non-threatening stimulus diminishes over time (Thompson & Spencer, 1966). Novelty captures our attention and familiarity releases it. Habituation is one of the oldest forms of learning, present across every organism with a nervous system (Rankin et al., 2009). With repeated exposure, the orienting response fades, freeing our attention towards whatever is new.
Without habituation, we would be too flooded with awe, fear, or reverence to move through an ordinary day. The same mercy that allows us to bear difficulties also dulls our awareness of what is good: clean water, functioning ecosystems, pollinators, forests, soil, and breathable air; the person who remembers, anticipates, cooks, cleans, listens, comforts, organizes, and carries emotional weight.
Recognizing What We Receive
Recent research offers a bridge between Tefnut and our own wiring.
Xinqi and colleagues (2026) tested whether gratitude towards nature predicts pro-environmental behavior. Across three studies, people with greater, more enduring gratitude to nature engaged in behaviors intended to protect it, experiencing a felt sense of responsibility and reciprocity. When we recognize ourselves as recipients of something that sustains us, we may become more compelled to care for it in return.
They found the effect functioned more like an orientation. How strongly it translated into action depended partly on whether being a caring, ethical person was already in someone’s sense of self or morality.
Reverence and Reciprocity
No one needs to feel the miracle of life at every moment; habituation and familiarity allow us to function. There are times for habituation and times for awe; however, the costs of the amnesia most of us practice by default are steep. What goes unnoticed goes unprotected, and that disconnection contributes to many dilemmas, like climate change and collective grief.
The bind of forgetting what matters can be interrupted. It may require the practice of noticing and honoring what holds us and then giving something back to it. The tricky part is snapping out of habituation long enough to situate ourselves in the larger context of interdependence, time, and space.
The ancient Egyptians used myth to personify what sustained them, giving it a face and a temper, reminding people it had a presence.
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Maybe there is a Tefnut in your life right now, human or otherwise. Maybe it is time to plan a festival to honor them before they have reason to leave.
I call my water Tefnut now.
