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A version of this essay was published in the Concord Monitor 6/25/14
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| Trout Fishing in the Suncook River 6/7/14 Photograph by Russet Jennings |
When we think of meditation
nowadays, we think of someone sitting cross-legged on a cushion focusing on her
breath or on the flickering flame of a candle in a no stress state of blissful tranquility.
However, other types of meditation can be quite different. The meditator can be active, as opposed to
being at rest; the object of his meditation can be anything she chooses; and
the meditation itself can be challenging and involve stress.
I found confirmation for
this last week when I went fly-fishing for the first time – judging from the
date of my last fishing license –since 2004, the year when I became more
mindful about not killing other sentient beings
Still, every Spring I would
daydream about times past, reveling in Nature’s glory, wading in babbling,
sun-dappled streams, feeling vitally alive, matching wits with a fish.
The urge to fish grew
stronger this year so I decided to try my luck on NH’s Free Fishing Day. The weather turned out to be gorgeous and the Suncook River was still coursing
along at a good clip but not too swiftly for a 69 year-old man stumbling around in heavy waders.
Amazingly, all my old gear
still worked; my floating line didn’t sink, my waders didn’t leak, and my dry
flies hadn’t been ravaged by moths. Equally amazing – like one never forgets how
to ride a bicycle – I still was able to present a dry fly gently on target and
do casting contortions like Houdini to escape snagging my hook on overhanging
foliage.
Grounded in The Now,
I lost all track of time: three hours went by in what seemed like an
instant. My body and mind became one, vibrant and fully alive, a blissful feeling that continued afterwards, even though I was sunburned and lame from tripping over submerged boulders
hidden by the glare of the sun.
Perhaps, I thought to myself, I had tapped into my
hunter/gatherer DNA. Of
course, in my case, I wasn’t hunting to kill: the few fish I hooked, river
roach and small bass, were safely released.
Certainly, I reverted back to a primordial state of being, becoming one with the ever-changing river in
all its manifestations: the dance of dappled light through the chartreuse
leaves, the flutter of red wing blackbirds and the antics of a young heron, the
swirl of the windblown currents punctuated occasionally by the ripple of a
rising fish.
With every cast of my fly, I
had to be ever so vigilant and mindful, keeping the line taut, ready to set the
hook in that nano second it takes for a fish to explode out of the water and
grab the bait but before he spits it out in disgust, realizing she has been
fooled by dead feathers and deer hair.
Fishing that day was a
glorious experience. The next morning I had another surprise: Reading the NYT,
still basking in the afterglow of my fishing experience, I had a synchronistic
rush when I came across John Coates’ essay The Biology of Risk .*
Coates confirmed the notion
that meditation can be active and even stressful. He says we get a rush
from the right amount of stress – like fly-fishing in a
river – “We thrive on risk taking. In fact, the
stress response is such a healthy part of our lives that we should stop calling
it stress at all and call it, say, the challenge response.”
He points out this stress mechanism is
always hard at work taking in information nonstop,
calculating what movement might be needed and preparing our body to execute it.
In fact, according to many neuroscientists today, it may be the essence of who
we are: that our brain is primarily designed to plan and execute movement.
“We do not process
information as a computer does, dispassionately; we react to it physically. For
humans, there is no pure thought of the kind glorified by Plato, Descartes and
classical economics.”
If he is right that we are
incapable of pure thought, perhaps we are also incapable of pure meditative
repose. But, even if that is the case, all is not lost: John Coates' essay
points us toward another variety of bliss.
Whenever we are stressed by the
novelty and uncertainty inherent in a project we are
passionate about – whether it be fly-fishing,
gardening, art, or motorcycle mechanics – our stress mechanism responds to this
challenge by releasing more hormones to prepare the body for action. If
everything meshes, we become fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus,
completely absorbed in the activity at hand.
The end result is a feeling of
spontaneous joy, even rapture, which Csikszentmihalyi calls being-in-the-flow in his classic book, Flow: The Psychology of
Optimal Experience.**
Certainly, being-in-the-flow perfectly
describes my spontaneous joy: standing in the flow of the Suncook River fishing.
XXX
* http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/08/opinion/sunday/the-biology-of-risk.html?emc=edit_th_20140608&nl=todaysheadlines&nlid=30753738
** Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990). Flow: The
Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row
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