Front Cover

Table of Contents

Foreward

Chapter Four

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Fourteen

Back Cover

Always “Half-Full”

“Did you think you were going to get the benefits without the burden?” my grandfather once said to me.

“What is that supposed to mean? “What a crazy old coot!” I thought to my adolescent self and then added, “What does that old guy know anyway?” After all, to this ten-year old, he spoke in riddles by not asking me the real question he wanted me to ponder. Much like people become with me now, I became agitated and frustrated with him. But, that was before I understood.

As a child, I spent many summer days with my grandparents and had the pleasure of fishing with my grandfather. Ailing with cancer, his temperament was often erratic and our conversations brief. Without exception, he rushed nothing. During my early years, I learned to fish with bait we caught ourselves. Using a cane pole and less than ten feet of line, I hooked onto my greatest catch…that phrase.

I didn’t know what the words – “the benefits without the burden”- meant. All I knew was that the sun was beating down on a hot rowboat in the middle of the day. He was asleep and I was bored out of my mind. He had anchored the boat not fifty feet from shore, and probably atop less than five feet of water. As he slept, I counted the small pan fish and minnows that passed by my lonely baited hook hanging motionless in the still water a foot above the lake’s sandy floor. Occasionally glancing at the red and white round bobber, I hoped the apple-sized sphere would dive below the water’s surface signaling that a fish was hooked. The scene usually played out the same way . . .

As grandpa slept, I wondered what I would do if I did catch a fish. Could I lift it out of the water without breaking the line? How would I reach for the net and maintain tension on the line? The scenarios ran through my head as I imagined landing a record catch. Hours would pass like this with few words spoken between a man and a boy who had so much time and so little to say. Mentally exhausted from my imaginative catches, I would ultimately calm myself into a fixated stare onto the water.

My quiet, peaceful trances were nearly always interrupted by a sudden commotion and orders to grab the net resting at my feet. Sure enough, the old guy would have a big fish on and my excitement would begin. Scrambling, he would net the pike and hoist the lunker into the boat. What’s up with that? This guy sleeps for two hours and always catches a fish. That is how we fished on those summer days. He motored out to his spot, threw out a line, went to sleep, woke to net the fish, and then motored back in again. Now that’s efficiency.

What part of the lesson was I missing all those years? All the mental exercise and frustration of watching for fish didn’t catch fish. We didn’t always catch fish, but he did always sleep. For only what seemed like a moment, I might drift away from the attention I paid to the bobber. Did I think I might miss something or not see the fish swallow the bait? I never saw fish anyway; I was always looking another way when the bobber submerged. What did my consternation gain? Where was his burden? I believe he had it all figured out. A man of few words got a lot of mileage out of the ones he spoke. Nearly two decades after his death, I realized my grandpa’s lesson wasn’t that the burden of going out in the boat reaped the benefits of catching a fish. The burden of “catching a fish” went with his benefit of a peaceful sleep.

We need to twist the obvious around and look at the obscure. Within the illogical I’ve found my greatest peace. I constantly challenge myself to see the brightest light in the most ominous darkness and recognize that the problem is a solution in process.