Our negativity bias is hardwired since the Old Stone Age.
Paleolithic man knew there were beings out there, out to get him. His bias the early warning system for woolly mammoths, giant bison, all the maneaters stalking nearby. It detected other hunter-gatherers too. Passively or aggressively, they were his competition for the local bounty.
He wasn’t being negative. Acutely aware of himself as predator and prey, he remained ever ready.
Early man was free. All his biases focused on self-preservation.
“Say something positive? Well, positive ain’t where I live.” ~ Teach
“Today man’s” well of self-preservationist instincts hasn’t run dry.
Seemingly, our thirst to tap it, acceptably quenched, has. A transcendentalist, my reasoning gained a brand around age eight, when I first read philosophy that mirrored what I felt. It regulates how I intake the world and its pressures.
Anchored in all creation’s essential unity and humankind’s inborn goodness, transcendentalists believe insight can supersede logic. I believe focus is insight’s pupil, helping us see things as we should, not as they appear.
Despite evolution, Paleolithic predispositions run DNA-deep. The negativity bias, and its insights, is still healthful.
~
On creeks and reservoirs from the Catskills to the Big Hole, the River Thames, and in Labrador, there are more beings out there — everywhere — than ever before. Passively and aggressively, we compete for the local bounty.
We determine these other hunter-gatherers’ success. Assaults we suffer we engage and allow.
“Assaults” unsettle solitude.
Whoops and hollers are bugles blown with each fish dry handed. The interruption always an intrusion. Throwaway questions—”Any luck?” and “Catching any?” — land offensively rhetorical.
Some assaults, silent, constitute emotional warfare.
From wader pockets and sling packs spent packaging, cardboard and plastic shop-branded fly pucks dropped and thrown blindly and carelessly, mar the landscape like oil wells in Charles M. Russell’s last paintings. Progress’ refuse signaling man’s onslaught.
Competition inhabits most environments. We determine their success. Assaults we suffer we engage and allow.
~
“Success depends almost entirely on how effectively you learn to manage the game’s two ultimate adversaries: the course and yourself.” ~ Jack Nicklaus
Jack knew. There were beings, his competition, out there, out to get him. Their success, in part, he determined.
~
A dry fly fisherman, my mindset mirrors Jack’s:
“Success depends almost entirely on how effectively I learn to manage our game’s two ultimate adversaries: the waterway and myself.”
~
In the way the Golden Bear observed “the field”— another course hazard—we can manage to see our “competition.” Fishing, tramping, birding, hunting, or gathering — no matter their pursuit — shrinking resources, in part, dictate their behavior. Aware. We cast our focus past them.
Insight can supersede logic.
Pardon the angler encroaching on your water. Something or someone is pushing him. Move further up or downstream and you’ve likely become the interloper you flee.
“It is what it is.”
Fishing everywhere, especially on our favorite creeks, lakes and rivers becomes more competitive. Growing angler numbers and perpetually challenged fish populations aggravate the reality. Logic dictates these days are the good days that one day we’ll lament.
They are what we make of them.
~
“Too damn crowded. Worse every day.” ~ John Woe
Grumbles like Woe’s echo loud as whoops and hollers in our periphery can.
Penetrating, if we engage and allow them.
Don’t.
The bounty isn’t a number or species of fish.
~
Meditative, focus is a practice. Managing our mind we manage to focus, amplifying our surroundings, increasing their vividness and acuteness.
The contrast sears.
Focused, rushing water becomes stereo the way I imagined Memorex, better than live. The arrangement babbles, bubbles, gurgles, ripples, roars, rushes.
I fish almost weekly year-round. The shortest prolonged break and I lose it. Sadder, I cannot recall what I’ve misplaced.
Spirit unsettled, even walking is different.
Focused, I feel my way in currents and over rocks as a blind man. Feet, my searching hands. Toes, my fingers, feeling. The agility making me smile inwardly. Proficiency is personal.
This wasn’t proficiency.
Unfocused, my surroundings tune to white noise.
Grimacing I peek, “looking” where I step. “Lying eyes,” they don’t feel so well either. I stumble to the spot.
First cast, close enough. Changing it up, going through the motions, knots tied with usual speed and dexterity. Threading flies was the struggle it always is.
I can’t see for shit.
~
Searching, at least the first hour was a blur.
Failing to manage the waterway or myself my surroundings muted. Gone, the mating Western Tanagers and their intensely colorful plumage. I saw birds. Far from transcending the moment, I was in it, hip wader deep—fishing. That’s all.
And I knew it.
~
I don’t know if I went fishing.
I can’t tell.
Really.
They weren’t buying.
And I had nothing to sell.
I caught a few.
Dew.
Hues.
Eagles and Ospreys.
Glimpses
And extended views.
I threaded the flies.
Tested the knots.
Ran through my options.
Box after box.
~
It was one of those days.
Transcendent.
~
I composed the full poem’s lyrics lying creekside.
I’d just taken a silly fall. Unhappy about it, I was delighting in the moment. Out of the sun’s glare, enough still hit my face below my eyeglasses to warm it. Waders and socks I’d placed on the bank’s incline to dry and drain. Spotify’s Yacht Rock from my iPhone sounded better than I ever imagined Memorex.
Bare, my feet rested on the waxed canvas jacket “floor” beneath them. A possibles pack, skinny from years of hard use, made a decent pillow. I’d wriggled into a comfortable soft sand chaise.
It superseded logic.
Rod down, waders donned, a spectator in the game, I wasn’t fishing. I was damp knees deep in the bounty.
And I knew it.
~
“Crocodile tears.”
My grandmother had a name for my most dramatic crying. I cry crocodile tears. Less and less it’s fish, number or type, that bring on the waterworks. More and more it’s the wonder of the water and all its works — flora, fauna and funga — that strike me most dramatically. Woods and wind play moving duets. Deer visit and linger.
Rarely it’s the size of the fish. Regularly it’s the size of the moment — the smallest always the sweetest — that move me most.
Even Paleolithic artisans’ passion crafts — cave art, relief carvings, movable sculpture — were only some of their many artistic expressions. Hunting, survival craft, was also artform; focused on the discipline, early man expressed himself as he would in any other, artistically.
Casting a line with a rod isn’t much different than casting an idea with my pen, or I calculate a club at a foe.
It’ll land as true as edited.
~
Dry fly fishing the English chalk stream style as I do, I hunt. Stalking is as much an artistic expression as the efficient cast and its air mend. My line-tending hand as essential as my casting hand’s pointer finger. They play harmoniously, melodic.
Quiet is a pursuit.
Hushed, damn near my only posture. Through currents and over rocks I move securely, as aware of branches close overhead as the deep pool three feet off my lead foot.
Semper Paratus.
I am free.
~
Amid all the bitching attesting increasingly crowded waterways, challenged fish populations, and man’s interventions, remains our freedom of focus. Regard it as more valuable than time. Focus is harder to attain, being earned not given, and maddeningly more complex to invest.
Managing our focus, we choose where and how we cast it. Competition for the bounty, we discern as beings as elemental to the bounty as the flora, fauna and funga found nearby. Superseding logic our insight trumpets these hunter-gatherers’ inborn goodness.
Despite the Woes we choose what we engage.
Some clarity from a transcendentalist’s perspective:
“Transcendent” spiritual experiences won’t spring from an outward, bygone, or future source.
They live in our “self,” manifestable in any moment. In those moments our mind illuminates the common features of its surroundings with potency, beauty, and interconnectedness.”
See?
To engage transcendent experiences, we’ll have to transcend the moment, managing ourselves.
Manage to transcend it.
Won’t you?
by Greg DuBose essayist, lyrical poet, creative director, lives in the American West. He is husband, father, grandfather, kind.
Remembering John Gierach. Man. Transcendent.
