The unexpected catch

I was facilitating a very difficult process last week with a complex group. Over three days, my plan for the work changed constantly, responding to the internal and external pressures that were flowing all around us. At the end of the second day, I felt slain, as if anything I tried to do had the opposite of its intended effect. It was a tough day for all of us.

On the third day, during which some remarkable transformations came forward from the group, one group member told me a story in a break. He was a commercial fisherman, who has fished salmon his whole life out in the Georgia Strait and around the mouth of the Fraser River. He described a time once when he cast his net and it got taken by the current and hung up around the jetty at the mouth of the Fraser. Thinking he was going to lose his net (or worse, capsize his boat), he carefully began to bring it in and was relieved to find that the net was not only intact, but it was also full of ling cod.

He was thankful for his good fortune, and has always had half a mind to try and do it again, but worried that he would lose his net. In short, it’s not the kind of good luck that can be easily repeated without major risks.

It took me close to a week to fully understand the reason for this story (sometimes Elders teach so subtly, THEY aren’t even aware they are doing so! And sometimes, the students are so preoccupied that we’re plain THICK…not sure which was the case here!)). So sometimes we make mistakes and once we realize them, a little attention and care can save our basic tools, and perhaps, even gather in a completely unexpected catch. It’s all about being open to the situation you are in RIGHT NOW, and not getting cocky when you pull out of it with a hold full of cod. For it is not always US that controls these things…sometimnes it is just the flow of the currents and the group mind of the ling cod.