As I mentioned in my last article, I’ve had a strange couple of weeks. Why isn’t important anymore, what is important is that the experience began to make me question the idea of happiness, it’s what we all want isn’t it? Well, most of us at least. Sure, there are some people whose happiness is misery, but then they are happy…right? I don’t know, I will leave that one to you fishing psychologists out there. But for those of us who are realistically living in a sane world, I think actual happiness is pretty important. We find it in so many things, the company of friends and loved ones, seeing your children succeed and define their own road in life, even the simple things like television, or a meal. Happiness is all around us and we seem to define ourselves so much in it’s context.
So I was flipping Kissimmee grass on Lake Okeechobee this week when I really began to delve into this topic. And believe me, for those of you out there who enjoy flipping, you will understand that the brain takes on something of a split fishing personality during the process. Flipping a jig or a soft bait is the ultimate in doing without thinking. Most people fail in flipping because they aren’t thorough, and while they are flipping, they are thinking about actually catching a fish.
Fools. You can’t catch a fish flipping. Only power fishing produces fish..
Seriously, flipping is the penultimate patience activity. To be that patient, you have to go elsewhere in your mind, a place where flipping is not at all about catching fish. Where it’s about quiet reckoning, maybe a little dreaming, and sorting out your own thoughts while your body flips that jig without you. Seriously, this is key. If you start thinking about actually catching fish while you are flipping, you would have a better chance of getting a fish by running it down with your trolling motor. (Which incidentally is how I got my first muskie, true story, no muskies were harmed during the run down, but he certainly was knocked the f#!k out. Had to hold him upright until he collected himself.)
Get lost in your own thoughts when you flip jigs, let your body do the work while you take a vacation and think of other things.
Like Happiness.
So here I was flipping say, 12 miles of grass, one little stalk at a time, nowhere to go, nothing else to do, no one to talk to, just a still life portrait on the deck of my boat while other fisherman passed by thinking, ‘wow…look at the intensity of that fisherman, he is focused.’
And it was true, so internally focused that every bite I got ripped me out of my contemplation, but don’t worry, you set the hook by instinct flipping, it’s probably best not to actually think about it too much. But in that process, I shifted from flipping as a fishing activity that I don’t really want to do, that is not particularly the most fun, and is highly tedious to something that became more like art as the body flipped, and the mind evolved, and somehow, if you really get it, they eventually meet in the middle.
It was here I really began to focus on the fact that happiness is not something you have, it is something that you find.
And once you find it, it evaporates as if it was never there to begin with and you have to begin the search anew. But that is not necessarily a bad thing. I think it all comes down to your personal take on the concept of heaven, which technically speaking, is supposed to be pure happiness.
The traditional concept of heaven, to me, does not feel right when I consider it. Because heaven, by most definitions, makes happiness easy to acquire and easy to keep and that really scares me. It scares me because when you remove the essential quest for happiness, I think my personhood would be removed as a result. I mean, when I listen to people talk about heaven, I can’t help by think that I would be like Odysseus amongst the Lotus Eaters. Now for all of you that did not study your Greek, let me give you a recap. Odysseus and his men are lost at sea for like 20 years, and you know that this is definitely fiction because that is not realistic in the Mediterranean, unless Troy was really in England, or the new world. (A little joke for you historian fisherman) But wherever they were, they were ragged, hungry, tired, afraid, cold and generally miserable. Think Tennessee fishing in early spring and you will get it. It is also key that the wind that blew them to the island of the Lotus Eaters was a north wind, so I imagine the fishing sucked along the way. But you know I don’t believe that, the fishing is always great, it the fisherman that fails to capitalize. But back to our recap.
So, Odysseus and his men land on the island of the Lotus Eaters where they are offered a plant that causes a ‘blissful forgetfulness.’ And they were so tired, that this was a welcome escape from legitimate suffering. But the problem was that many of them did not want to leave, they made the choice to forget their families, their duty, and thoughts of home, and accept this artificial happiness. Can you blame them? Lost at sea in an open boat, bunch of unruly guys, monsters attacking, starvation and death.
It is very easy to look at the pain of living and imagine a blissful forgetfulness, a place where all the things that cause you pain, that keep you up at night, that make you pace the floor are just… gone.
Bliss is a powerful word. But the problem is that it is very close to words like oblivious, unconscious, and unaware.
In the end, the men were so overcome by the temptation they had to be dragged back to the boat by Odysseus in order to escape. I have always been touched by the way Homer actually expressed these events. He writes, as Odysseus ‘nevertheless, though they wept bitterly I forced them back to the ships and made them fast under the benches.’
Though they wept bitterly… That is a very strong image, grown men, soldiers, sailors, men whose bravery and dedication to duty cannot be questioned, thus reduced, and when given a reprieve, wept as children when it was taken away.
We need happiness. We must have it to be those men when they were at their best, to have that courage, to be dedicated to duty. And when it is taken away we become the ragged version of what we could be, and become susceptible to accepting a substitute, and if you are driven far enough into the darkness, you will swear the substitute is real, and reject that which is authentic.
Life is far scarier than anyone is prepared to admit. Happiness mitigates the fact that we are all very much solitary ships enduring what is an endless sea. The point here is that it isn’t just about happiness, it is about the nature of the happiness, and the context from which it is derived.
Real happiness is earned, and found through perseverance and struggle against this state of uncertain life that we all find ourselves in.
I define myself through struggle. The struggle to grow, the struggle to succeed, the struggle to overcome my weaknesses and find strength. The struggle to face my fears and gain courage. These things define me as a human being. I have been in a 50 year war to control my own mind, my fate, and through struggle, walk the road I choose and earn my happiness for just a few moments, before its gone and the struggle begins again.
This is why I am so vulnerable to mean people, and so endearing to kind ones. You see, as we all travel through life in our minds, our own bodies, perceiving from a single point of view, there is deep loneliness that no one can deny. You hear people say ‘everyone dies alone’, well you know what, its true. And I don’t discount friends and family, their importance and support of a dying loved one, never. But in the end, we all go out by ourselves, the way we lived, by ourselves.
That is why there is so much happiness to be found in love and friendship, comradery, a quiet moment by the camp fire, someone telling you that you did well, a genuine romance…these things have meaning because they counter an ever present state of aloneness.
While I will be the first to admit that life, with all of the hardship, can be pretty brutal, but at the same time I fear the removal of this state even more than it’s alleviation, because I can’t see how our personhood can remain consistent if it were removed.
So I can’t tell you anything about heaven, I will be the first to say I am conflicted on the subject, but happiness we must find nevertheless.
This is seriously deep stuff for flipping jigs, I agree, but we will get back to that after we cover the next logical topic here, which is hardship in the context of a higher power.
I can’t tell you a single thing about God, creation, pretty much anything involving that topic. I have some thoughts sure, but I don’t know and I admit it. But there are two things that I think are important and they both relate to happiness in general.
First, I believe in the saying that God loves those who do for themselves. This is not meant to downplay God, but rather it is a motivational message that implies that if you want something, don’t ask for it, go out and earn it with your skill, and the faith in your ability. If you want to win, don’t ask God, practice, persevere, and win. The only person you ask for a win from is you. And in persevering, in winning, in overcoming you will get far more than if it were given, there is no greater happiness than earned victory on a level playing field.
Second, I believe that in matters of Man vs. Bass, God takes no sides. And if he did, I think he would definitely take the Bass. Every time I hear a fisherman saying thank you God or thank you Jesus for a Bass I get severely ill. I am not kidding, it makes my skin crawl. Like imagine God up in heaven looking at say… Phil, who has 4 decent fish and is asking the Lord for a kicker on a Saturday morning regional so he can weigh up next to the degen professional fisherman who are in between tournaments. And God, up in heaven, wills a poor bass, who escaped innumerable terrors going from a hatchling through all the horrible days to finally be the kicker in question, and now just wants some lunch, to hit a lure, get a barbed hook fired through his jaw, ripped out of the water, photographed by idiots who practically suffocate him, put in a 2×4 cell, doused with narcotics, and then taken on a paddywagon run with no seat belts, put in another bag, taken out of the bag and held up again, put on a scale, screamed at with a megaphone, dropped in some more narcotics, and abandoned in the late evening in a strange part of the lake along with 500 other victims.
Bass Fishing is a blood sport, do not mistake this statement…ever. We are not athletes, we are hunters. We are not kind to the fish, we are savages. Quit involving God in it. But I digress.
How do you find happiness? I guess you begin by asking some serious questions and providing honest answers. Since you are having this conversation with yourself, don’t worry, no one is going to tell, unless you do. (Another little quip for my psychologist fishing friends.) But being honest is so key here. What do you want? I can’t answer it for you, only for myself.
One thing I decided that I wanted was to have an untroubled brow. Now this requires explanation, for those of you who are big Conan the Barbarian fans, and I know you are out there in the fishing community, there is a key quote from the book, ‘And unto this, Conan, destined to wear the jeweled crown of Aquilonia upon a troubled brow.’ This quote is actually really important because it is something I experienced deeply in my life. Now, for those who don’t know me, I did not grow up in Cimmeria, I do not worship Crom, I was not put in the wheel of pain, sold to be a pit fighter, you get the point.
But the troubled brow part in the wake of success is something I know quite well.
I want to succeed in fishing without having a troubled brow because that is exactly what I had in corporate America at the end of my career. I was so unhappy in the wake of my success that it made the success hollow. Its not that I was a bad executive, I never worked for bad corporations, in fact my employers in my mind were incredibly honest, and caring for their employees and customers, it was simply the whole system that is inherently unfair that troubled me. There is no fairness in the real world, plain and simple, and because of that fact, success is not really success.
Yahoos are everywhere in the world, some of them are born more privileged than others, and because the world is unfair, truly magnificent people are often left to the wayside. Make no mistake, you have likely been served a burger and fries by a Mozart who never learned to play, or an Einstein no one thought to offer the encouragement to learn math.
Corporate America, in itself is innocent, but is nevertheless a gigantic manifestation of this unfair system. And so my success was not really success, but rather it was something different, and what I cannot really say. Ultimately, I was left so unsatisfied that I had to leave, and I never looked back. It is also important to mention that I came to the realization that there was no solution either, capitalism is not fair, but it is a whole lot more fair than the other options, which inherently degenerate into totalitarianism, but that is a whole different discussion, maybe we will do that one over drop-shotting next summer.
I chose to fish because like you, I love fishing, but there is also a sense of fairness in fishing, not perfect by any means, and certainly not for the fish, but it’s pretty good given the alternatives, and success in fishing is real success. For me, it’s not about making money or getting famous, it’s about earning something that will bring me happiness, earned happiness, and leave me with an untroubled brow.
And this is what I try to explain to people when they ask why I do this. I don’t want the watered-down happiness of the past, or the artificial happiness offered by blissful forgetfulness, and I even wonder if I would want whatever might exist as complete happiness in an afterlife, I want the earned happiness here on earth, and maybe the heaven part is good health, long lost friends, your lower unit cuts logs in half, and marina gas is cheap.
Fools. Even in heaven marina gas prices will make you question where you are.
There are a hundred articles and videos that can teach you how to flip, where to flip, but I have never read one that explores why to flip, so here you have it. Take your fishing to the next level when you flip the jig, let the body do the work and fill your mind with intelligent, constructive thinking. Solve your problems off the water on the water. Grow as a person, as a spouse, a parent, and a friend.
And remember, Happiness is not something you have, it is something that you find.
So go find it…flipping.
