The art of false casting...

      For those of you reading this that do not fly-fish, the false cast is what the fly angler does to lengthen the amount of line at play. That is, it is what most people envision when they think of fly-fishing. It is the image of the angler, standing knee-deep in a river, with a loop of line whistling over his head that conjures the romantic image associated with fly-fishing. Besides the fact that this often looks very impressive, the false cast also has a very real purpose. As I stated before, it lengthens the angler's line, thereby increasing the range of the cast. It also helps the angler to place their fly on-target, achieving the the goal of a perfectly placed cast, and hopefully rewarding the angler with a well-earned bounty.

      The true fact of the matter is that it is nearly impossible to truly master the art of casting without first mastering the art of the false-cast. If an angler fails to false-cast enough, they will undershoot their target, too much, and they'll overshoot. Often, even after false-casting to the proper distance, the cast will land off target, and the angler will immediately raise the line out of the water and begin to false-cast again, changing and adjusting it ever so slightly in order to make the next cast perfect.

      In our own daily lives, whether we are anglers or not, we're all making “false casts” without ever realizing it. Working toward our own personal goals and aspirations requires us to be constantly false casting and making miscalculations in order to make our next cast just a little more perfect than the last. We are forever adjusting our efforts to avoid making recurring mistakes. Only after countless misplaced casts, readjustments, and improvements, can we really make our casts fully count.

      Often our false-casts may begin to feel redundant, causing fatigue and frustration. At times, we may not know how to adjust our casts so that they fall perfectly in the next attempt, and the only viable option is to continue to false cast until we have perfected it. If we are to fully appreciate the casts we make in our lives, we must learn to appreciate the art of the false cast. At the times when we begin to feel as though we have expended every ounce of energy and have exhausted our efforts in the hopes of perfecting our casts, if we simply lay our line onto the water once more, we'll often see our goal become reality. For every precise cast we make, we may have to false cast a hundred times, but the one cast that falls exactly where we want it to will cause all the false casts to become nothing more than stepping stones that got us to our goals. Then, and only then, will our casts become worthwhile. All of our fatigue disappears, our frustrations vanish, and the rewards of our efforts will be seen through the perfection we've achieved.

Make the memories count...

    
  “In the quiet times of my life, I occasionally reach into the back of mind and try to recall better, more peaceful times when happiness was easily found, when friendships were abundant, and when life was most enjoyable. Instead, I am often plagued by the memories of bygone days and of things left undone or unsaid. I am haunted by recollections of the bridges I have burned and the friendships I have lost. These are the memories that make up my life. At times, I feel I have become an old soul trapped in the body of a younger man, trying my hardest to live up to the expectations I've set for myself, and those set for me by the people I've let down in the past.” Less than two short years ago, I penned this paragraph in my notebook, while trying to think of the memories in my life that made up the fabric of “me”. Try as I might, at that point in my life, I could not clear away the mental debris and crawl from the rubble to find my good memories. I had pushed them aside and replaced them with all of the darkest memories that remained.

      One of the dark memories that has haunted me since the day it occurred was the last day I ever fished with my grandfather. No, it was not on some peaceful lake or on a forgotten trout stream. The day was not bright and warm, in fact, it was raining outside, and the only light was that which shone in the window of a first floor room of a nursing home. My grandfather had severe dementia, likely brought on by countless other ailments that had taken everything but the shell of the man that I once saw as the strongest, most respectable man I had ever known. As I sat by his side, talking with my grandmother, who also resided in the nursing home, my grandfather raised his hand as though holding a fishing rod, and began to turn the reel with his other hand. I think that, in his mind, he truly believed that I was at his side, fishing as we had done so many times before. Tears came to my eyes, and the image burned itself into the back of my mind. I sat for as long as I could hold my tears, and left as the first rolled from my eye. A few days after, my grandfather passed away. To the best of my knowledge, the first time I ever took the opportunity to tell my grandfather how I felt about him was at his funeral, and the words were audible only to me, resonating in the corridors of my own thoughts. I have tried a countless number of times to replace this memory with one of the many happier memories that I have of my grandfather, but my efforts have been in vain.

      Of the memories we hold in the confines of our minds, we may at times forget some of the details. The date, or time, or place may escape our consciousness. Should we fail to recall all other components of our memories, the one element that should be locked into the memoirs of our days must be the people that have been by our side to see our trials and tribulations, our missteps and our masterpieces. I urge that above all other things, we should push the very edges of our cognizance to never forget the people that have lived our adventures with us.

      As we make memories with the people in our lives, we should, in turn, polish them as they occur so that they never lose their luster. Embellish them by making them as valuable as possible. Take the opportunity to tell or at least show the people around you what they mean to you. Swallow...no, devour... your pride and convey your feelings to the people around you. We do not have, nor ever will have, the ability to amend the opportunities we have missed throughout the course of our lives. The ashes of burnt opportunity should never be allowed to cloud the brilliance of the recollections that we hold dear. Treat those in your lives as though they are the gems that sparkle the brightest when you someday clear away the cobwebs, dust off the treasure chest of your mind, and marvel at the riches you've accumulated in your life.

      I'm really not one for profound statements, and those who know me know that, at times, I struggle to even say the things I'm attempting to say without thinking before every word. The ability of spoken word is apparently one that has escaped me somehow, which is why I so often choose to write my thoughts, instead. I know some of you may have heard me say the following statement before, but I'm throwing it out there again because it resonates so loudly in my own mind whenever I think of the people in my own life: Our own candle shall never have the ability to shine so brightly alone as it does when illuminated by the flame of those around us. This is a thought that sticks in the back of my mind as I attempt to make new memories with the people around me, so that someday, during the darkest times in my own life, my memories shall forever shine through.  

Testament of a Fisherman...

This is one of my all-time favorite writings that I just wanted to share with everyone from Robert Traver's "Testament of a Fisherman".  Robert Traver was the pen-name of John Voelker, the attorney and former Michigan Supreme Court Justice who also wrote "Anatomy of a Murder". Enjoy!

"I fish because I love to; because I love the environs where trout are found, which are invariably beautiful, and hate the environs where crowds of people are found, which are invariably ugly; because of all the television commercials, cocktail parties, and assorted social posturing I thus escape; because, in a world where most men seem to spend their lives doing things they hate, my fishing is at once an endless source of delight and an act of small rebellion; because trout do not lie or cheat and cannot be bought or bribed or impressed by power, but respond only to quietude and humility and endless patience; because I suspect that men are going along this way for the last time, and I for one don't want to waste the trip; because mercifully there are no telephones on trout waters; because only in the woods can I find solitude without loneliness; because bourbon out of an old tin cup always tastes better out there; because maybe one day I will catch a mermaid; and, finally, not because I regard fishing as being so terribly important but because I suspect that so many of the other concerns of men are equally unimportant - and not nearly so much fun." - Robert Traver (John Voelker)

Through the eyes of the trout...

      As you likely already know, the places where I generally go to clear my head are to the forests, the fields, and more commonly, the streams. For whatever reason, streams seem to bring me a renewed outlook on life that I cannot obtain anywhere else. Perhaps it's simply the sound of the gurgling riffles, or the peacefulness that comes when you finally reach a point in a stream where you can no longer hear a passing car on a nearby road, but more than likely, it's a combination of these and all other features that make up the areas where trout live. Robert Traver wrote that the places where trout live are “invariably beautiful”, while the places where we live “where crowds of people are found, are invariably ugly”. I've considered this many times and have realized that it is not the places where we live, but instead it is the way in which we live in these places that is ugly. Granted, there is a definitive change of scenery between the towns where people congregate, and the streams where trout congregate, but these are miniscule differences when compared to the societal disparity that exists between the two “habitats”. While I generally try to avoid anthropomorphizing, in this case, I feel it is only right to do so.

      To a trout, the concerns of the world exist in a relatively small sphere of which they occupy. The concerns of the trout are quite simple. They care only about clean water, food, someplace to live, and reproduction. They are hardly bothered by the concerns that seem to trouble us as people and plague our societies. In fact, society to a trout simply means the other trout that they may bump into in the hole that they live in. The concerns that reach the pits of their minds likely do not consist of “look at how that trout is behaving”, or “look at that trout's stupid hairstyle”. Additionally, a trout will never express any disdain over another trout for it's lack of a flat stomach (although the idea of a trout with a little mini six-pack is quite amusing). Instead, their thoughts probably more closely resemble “can I eat this fish, will it eat me, how do I outcompete it for food, and can I mate with it?” A trout will never waste the effort of examining the way another trout wears it's spots, nor will it have any concern for how much those spots cost. Likewise, the trout will never show any appreciation for how thick another trout's wallet is, and has no idea what a wallet is.

      The most complex issues of trout derive from finding the ability to discern food as it drifts rapidly past. Never has a trout involved itself in a political debate, or had a heated discussion about religion and the existence of (insert deity here). A trout has no regard for the color of another trout's skin, or how that trout may choose to live it's life. Instead, the trout cares only for how it lives its own life, and worries only about what is going on in it's own sphere of existence. It cares not about the level of education of other trout, and has no desire to assert its own intelligence over the intelligence of others. It will never choose to play mind games with, nor discount the emotions of, another trout.

      A trout will never...well, okay, I think you get where I'm going with this, so I feel I can cease my rambling. The point is, that as people, it seems at times that we have become so entangled in the complexity of life that we often forget to enjoy and embrace the most simple aspects of it. Is it possible that because of the level of intelligence that we have, we have forgotten how to use it? Has the basic quality of being human excluded our ability to appreciate humanity? If this, then, is where evolution has led us, I personally feel the need to devolve. I have seen enough of the world through my own eyes, and I think, maybe it's time for me to view the world as though I were looking at it through the eyes of the trout...    

The confluence...

      In the waters I've fished in my life, I've often come across places where tributaries flow into streams, streams into creeks, and creeks into rivers. The technical term for these places where flowing waters meet is “confluences”. Whenever I come across these gathering waters, many times I've sat and pondered which way to go. More often than not, I choose to stick to the main streams, in waters I've fished before, that are familiar to me, where I know what to expect. Occasionally, however, I choose to take the path of the tributary, the unfamiliar direction that leads me to things unknown, waters unfamiliar.

      At times, I end up finding success by straying from the beaten path. Other times, I follow the tributaries until I can follow no more, ending in a small trickle that holds no promise. When the latter occurs, I usually turn around, walk back the path I've taken, head back to the confluence and put myself back on the main path.

      At a point not long ago, as I walked back from one of these unsuccessful ventures on a relatively unknown stream, I came to the realization of the similarity of the confluences in the stream to the times in my life when I was unsure which path to take and had to make difficult decisions about which direction to go. Should I have chosen the familiar, often traveled streams and continue on a comfortable path, following the direction of so many before me, or should I have chosen the path that would lead me to unknown territory, where nothing was sure except that I'd end up walking where I had not walked before?

      The realization of this similarity was shortly followed by the epiphany of the alterity of the two. In choosing a stream, if the decision proves abortive, there is always the possibility of turning around, going back to the confluence, and choosing the opposite path. In life, the path we choose is the one we must stick with. Sure, we will come to further confluences, where our path can be altered, and may lead us in time to more fruitful streams, but the reality is also that although the direction may vary, it is still simply a feeder of the same tributary, that eventually always derives from the choice we made at the confluence.

      This reality seemed very daunting to me at first, and for an instant, made me wish it had not occurred to me. When I reached the confluence, I sat and thought in earnest about this for some time. I perched on a rock, looking into the stream I was on, as though it would provide some consolation to me in my state of mental entanglement about the situation. Lo and behold, it did. The stream always flows the same direction, constantly moving, never reversing it's path. The water that flows through at one second is replaced in the next by new water. It's constitution is always the same, but it's position is constantly changing. The water that flows by one point shall never again see that same point. The short memory that the river has of the water that just passed by is displaced by the waters that have yet to come. At the confluences of life, whichever path we might choose to take, we may only move in a single direction. The choice we made at the confluence and the waters we have traveled disappear behind us in the mists of our memory, and the promise of what new waters may bring is where our hopes shall lie.

-M