Scaring the Fish Away – A Lesson in Mastery

It was a bright, sunny Saturday morning.  My daughter Megan was seven and she and I had decided to try our hand at fishing.

Though I had grown up on a farm that boasted a pond filled with Catfish and Bluegill, I had never been much of a fisherman.  I was too talkative and too active and my father was always admonishing me to be quiet.  He said I was scaring the fish away.  Fish, I decided, were a skittish and boring lot.

Fishing was also another one of those things that I came to believe I simply wasn’t born to do.  I didn’t do it right.  I didn’t bait the hook properly.  I didn’t cast my line correctly.  I reeled the hook in too quickly or too slowly.  My father always seemed so exasperated and I always felt so disappointing.  In time, I simply rejected his invitations to join him on his trips to the water’s edge.

But when a seven year old girl with big blue eyes asks you to take her fishing, you do what any strong willed man would do.  You cave.

So there we were on that Saturday morning with our borrowed poles and the worms we had dug up from the soft brown earth that made up the land of my family’s farm.  And there, along side us, was my father to offer his expertise.

Things started off well enough.  He showed Megan how to put the worm on the hook and, much to my pleasant surprise, she did not shy away from the wet and squirming critters.

He taught her how to hold the pole, how to reel up the line until the plastic bobber was just a few inches away from the rod’s tip, and how to press down on the release button with her thumb.  Check.  Check.  Check.  All was smooth and breezy.

He demonstrated how the rod should be raised until one’s hand is just about at eye level, and how with a gentle forward sweeping motion, contained in the wrist, and a lift of the thumb from the release button at the ten o’ clock position one could send the line sailing out, out, out across the water to a chosen, distant spot.

Megan was a quick learner and everyone was pleased.  Over and over she cast her line and delighted in her increasing ability to hit her mark, and drawn in by her enthusiasm, I began to do the same.

If it had been up to Megan and me, I believe we could have spent the entire day mastering the art of casting.  Fish be damned.

But my father, a big hearted man with good intentions, simply couldn’t allow that.  He was determined to teach a seven year old everything he knew about fishing in a single outing, and that’s how the whole thing began to get tangled.

I knew something about Megan that my father didn’t.  Megan has always been strong willed and fiercely independent.  She will allow you to teach her something but only when she is good and ready.  She masters things in stages.  She’ll work on one step of a process until she’s satisfied and when she’s ready for the next challenge, but not one second before, she’ll look you up.

My father, however, would have none of this.  “Look here,” he’d say, grabbing the pole from Megan’s hands, trying to move onto the next lesson in his syllabus.  She began to protest and I saw the familiar wrinkling of the forehead that always signaled the digging in of heels.  An argument ensued.  I attempted to mediate.  I took Megan aside and explained that her grandfather meant well.  I quietly attempted to explain Megan’s learning style to my father.  Neither of them were budging.

Suffice it to say that things went downhill from there, and our fishing trip was cut short as a result.  What had started out as a promising little adventure had deteriorated into an emotionally exhausting outing.

And, to be truthful, I was angry.  My father was a beautiful man, but patience had not always been one of his virtues and the entire experience had brought back a flood of memories of having things grabbed from my hands simply because I couldn’t master the various aspects of various tasks according to my father’s hurried schedule.

During the tensely quiet process of packing up our gear to leave, my father remarked, “Well, I know one thing.  She’s no fisherman.”  I honestly wanted to punch him.

My father could never understand why I received such high praise for my work ethic from teachers and employers when I seemed to have so little interest in doing anything that required working along side him.  He thought and I had often agreed that I must be lazy.  I wasn’t, and whether or not Megan was an angler would have to be decided at another time in another place where my father was nowhere to be seen because she decided that day she’d have nothing more to do with it.

My father had scared the fish away.

I know this about my father.  He loved me and my sisters and all his grandchildren immensely.  He’s one of my heroes.  But sometimes, when it came to teaching us how to do things, with all his impatience and chatter and bustling and pushing, he often sent us fleeing far beneath the water’s surface.

I wonder how often this happens in our schools?  Children, otherwise eager to learn, are sent into hiding because some teachers expect immediate mastery.  “Well, I know one thing.” you can almost hear those teachers say, “Johnny’s no scientist, Susan’s no artist, and Kevin’s no athlete.”

And how often do we do this to ourselves?  How often do we frighten ourselves away from potential sources of interest, joy, and meaning because we’re constantly berating ourselves for not mastering the entire process in one mad attempt?

Are we scaring the fish away?  Are we sending the best parts of ourselves into hiding with all our impatience and chatter and bustling and pushing?

Can we have a little patience with ourselves and learn to master the things that grab out interest in steps and stages, allowing ourselves to spend the whole day casting if we feel the need?

I hope so.

By the way, my father was wrong.  Today, Megan is perhaps the most avid fisher in our family.  She and her buddies make frequent trips to a pond where they cast their lines again and again and reel in not only fish, but friendship as well. She finally learned to love fishing when she was surrounded by a group of peers who had no set schedule and no set agenda other than to spend some time together and enjoy the whole process one delightful piece at a time.  It’s a masterful thing to behold.

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Tagged as: Guilt Free Creativity