Sometimes when I guide first time fly fishers they just don’t get certain important concepts of fly fishing. One of the most important aspects of fly fishing that I try to emphasize from the beginning is teaching how to “let go”, when they hook a fish. They have to allow the fish to “run”. without trying to stop it otherwise the fine leader will break. More specifically,” letting go” means (and I explain this precisely to my clients) for the fly fisher to take their hand off the reel handle and to make sure neither hand is clamped on the fly line. Again and again I will yell the words, “Let go”, but often they just don’t get it and the fish breaks off.
It can become frustrating to the point of being comical when as a guide your client keeps breaking off fish after fish simply because he will not allow the fish to run and tire itself out. Breaking off fish means that as the guide I have to keep tying on new flies and rigs and this process can get a bit frustrating. I review again and again what the concept of letting go means. Sympathetically, sometimes my discussion will even include how letting go is counter intuitive and counter instinctual. How can a great hunter that feels his prey pulling hard on the line and swimming away not want to fight back and try to be in control?
When it gets sort of comical is when after the fifth or sixth or maybe tenth fish is broken off in this manner and I am standing there with the stripped leader in my hand, sometimes the client will turn to me and say, “So, I have to let go”? And I patiently and calmly respond, “Yes, you have to let go. That is what I have been saying”,(but of course in my mind, I am thinking other things that I should not say and do not say and can’t say) Then, often the client will say, “Oh I get it now”. But they don’t.
And yet I have learned that when there repeatedly seems to be people in my life who I think, “Don’t get it”, then there is probably something in my own life that I am not getting. There is probably nothing I need to learn more than spiritually being able to “let go”. Letting fish run is one thing and quite easy for me but letting go of my tight controlling grip on life is a whole other matter.
So, I am the one who doesn’t get it. . It doesn’t matter how many times I have it explained to me or how I think about it or how many books I read on it or how many times I try to pray about it, I make the same miserable mistakes over and over. My inability to “get it” and “let go” has caused me more unhappiness and more anxiety than all the combined grief suffered from fish broken off by beginner fly fishermen that I have guided in the past 25 years.
Not “letting go” in the spiritual life for me often results in an uneasiness. The more uneasy I become the tighter my grip. The feeling is a frustrating awareness of strangling out life itself. Anxiety and fear dominate my being. Happiness and peace elude me. In essence I am miserable. But usually my own misery will not loosen my grip on life. And I am the one, who just doesn’t get it.
More specifically, I think one area of the Christian life that is most difficult for me to “let go” of is when it comes to experiencing the divine. Once I even begin to experience something that might be spiritual I tend to grab at it and clutch it refusing to let go in the same way a beginner fly fisher refuses to let go of the reel when he hooks into his first fish and it is pulling out line. But God cannot be controlled. We cannot make God dance for us or do magic tricks nor can we even control how we experience him in our being. I am reminded of my own inability to control life from “A River Run’s Through It”. Paul had just caught a truly beautiful fish and Norman and his father stand admiring him and his fish. The Reverend says, “You are a fine fisherman”. Norman thinks; “My brother stood before us like a work of art but just as assuredly, I knew the moment could not last”. I know in my own life there have been moments, beautiful moments, moments that I could even call divine that I wanted to last forever but try as I may, I could not stop the moment from passing. I am reminded of a line from William Blake, “He who binds himself a joy, does the winged life destroy, but he who kisses a joy as it flies lives in eternity’s sunrise”
Every once in a while when circumstances almost force me, I am sometimes able to give up and “let go”. This letting go for me is not a spiritual state I am able to attain or produce of myself. At best, it is more out of a form of default and it feels as though I don’t really have much choice in the matter. Figuratively speaking, the fish hooked is so BIG that I have no choice but to let it go. Spiritually when I encounter obstacles that seem bigger than life, or at least bigger than my life, sometimes for several moments, I am able to let go and enter a state of flow, with out all my contriving, similar to the flow of the river and I am strangely at peace and content. And ironically, some times the less control I have over my life the more at peace I feel.
Sometimes when I feel this strange peace and letting go then my prayer becomes the prayer of the poet, “May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing or holding back the way it is with children. Then in these swelling and ebbing currents, these deepening tides moving out, recurring, I will sing you as no one has”. (Rilke)
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