Live A Large Life

While residents of the Southern Hemisphere are coming inside for the winter and those in the Northern one are about to go outdoors, both groups are entering periods conducive to thinking about the future. Whether reading by the fire or surrounded by the wonders of nature, students can find seasonal inspiration for life choices that plunge them into the whole wide world.

     For a little help in seeing beyond the here and now, Luke Jennings, a British journalist and avid fisherman, provides his brief book, Blood Knots. Beginning with his title that combines references both to family ties and a way to prepare fishing tackle, Jennings shows young people how to push beyond the ordinary to reach the personal joy of achieving expertise in any field.

     Jennings' own inspiration came from a father who bore scars from pulling fellow soldiers from a burning tank in World War II, and the free-spirited, falcon-owning Robert Nairac, who valued the precision of dry-fly casting that demanded the frustrating "hard right way." Even before meeting Nairac, however, Jennings wrote there was no one in his family who ever fished, "So I learnt from library books by Bernard Venables, Richard Walker, Peter Stone, and Fred Taylor.

     What can be learned from books is not limited to fishing. Even in summer, there are rainy days, when a trip to the library can stimulate an interest that leads to adventures in foreign countries the way fishing took Jennings to Guyana, Australia, Hong Kong, and South Africa.

     Books enable young people who lack financial means to experience the same new ideas and cultures others derive through travel. In Blood Knots, I learned, for example, fishing hooks come in different sizes, a #18 is smaller than a #12. Dry-fly casting for trout begins with making a fly using a delicate bit of silk and feather and requires, like kite flying, an open space where swinging a fishing line overhead and forward will not tangle it in an overhanging branch. No wonder, trout anglers don hip boots and wade into rivers.

     If students are lucky, reading will enhance their means of expression and chances of winning Scrabble by sending them to a giant dictionary to expand their vocabulary with new words, such as numinous, pellucid, ilex, ferrules, elegiac, jejune, and jinking, some of the words Jennings used in Blood Knots. Young people also will begin to find themselves observing and describing their experiences the way Jennings did in the following sentence: "Pigeons flew over us, cresting the roadside trees with a single wing-snap and gliding to their roosts."

     Once students recognize time as a fusion of past, present, and future, the way Jennings came to view it, a lifetime holds a world of opportunity.