On a lake in New York somewhere, I was to young to know the geography, and all I had to know that it was near my uncle's house. (though I am not sure if he was a true uncle, or just a friend of the family, like a brother, so we called him Uncle Sam. The day was beautiful, cool in the shade and warm in the sun, and fishing was so-so. I don't remember how it happened, but one of the casting rods decided to mangle a big rats nest of filament. At the time, I did not see the logic in cutting off the rat's nest and starting with untangled (albeit much shorter) line.
I proceeded to focus my attention on that random ball/knot before it got any worse. It must have taken me 30 minutes or maybe even an hour, I really do not remember, I lost track of time, as I pulled and turned and followed each strand of the fine threads of the nearly opaque plastic line. I never felt a sense of giving up, or frustration, it was almost a calm focus, a challenge, a puzzle. The adults in the boat offered to cut the line once, that I remember, but must have seen the determined look on my face (I was just quietly doing something while they fished...). I guess that said to them, let me try.
I did get the line untangled and wound carefully back into the fishing reel, and later that day caught the largest fish I have ever caught on a lake, an eleven inch crappie (mostly white with lots of black spots). I did not keep it, and we released it back, keeping only the memory.
There have been many other times in my life that this true focused calm has come over me. Building model cars and planes, building with LEGOs and assembling puzzles. There is something that distracts me from stress or worry or most of the outside world for that matter as I find such things for myself to do. It is never about deadlines, other people's expectations, it was just me and something to solve in my own way.
To find this as an adult . . . I have to wonder how far I would have to look? I did a very complex jigsaw puzzle with the collective help of a few others, just a few months ago, and I will say that it was satisfying to complete, even if it was not just My work alone.
Where to go with this? I suppose that I could tackle my new classwork (we had a quiz the other day and I was able to answer every question (fairly confidently) and though it was not to be part of our grade, I was happy to know that I am going to be able to jump into things, work through them (math problems in this case) and solve the problems at hand. This makes me oddly happy.
- Mike
Oh that's really neat -- I can picture you doing this with calm concentration. I wonder if this is the thing that comes over engineers and other problem solvers as they work. This is the elusive state of "flow" that people say is a key ingredient to life contentment (whatever brings that flow, they say, do more of it!). Cool!
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