Guest Blogger Steve Ehrlich tells us how fly fishing and a purposeful life go hand in hand. Steve has a Ph.D. and lifelong, parallel careers in adult education and fly fishing.

Stories from the Stream: A Fly Fishing Guide to Purposeful Living
Norman Maclean’s celebrated narrative, “A River Runs Through It,” along with many
other stories from the stream, illustrate how fly fishing can help you define purpose, navigate
change, clarify roles and relationships, and solve problems in your personal and work life.
Guided by lessons and reflections from some of fly fishing’s most revered literature, and by your
own experience on the stream, you can learn to “read the water” of your own life for deeper
meaning, face difficult questions and challenges, and create the life story you really want.
Maclean ended his fabled short story, “A River Runs Through It,” with a brief,
mystifying sentence: “I am haunted by waters.” But this ending is really a beginning, an
invitation to face, with deeper self-understanding, the simultaneous elegance and fear of being
human. “A River Runs Through It” is an enduring story about a family’s love and loss, and the
imperfect faith and understanding to bear the splendor and weight of both. It is a memorable
narrative about life’s contradictions such as reason and faith, head and heart, light and dark, hope
and despair, life and death, that ultimately define the paradox of the human condition and the
gray spaces of complexity, uncertainty, and volatility where most of us live and work. The
central tenet of “A River Runs Through It” and, I suggest, purposeful adult life, is the capacity
and faith to live and work in those gray spaces where, as Maclean writes, “everything is
luminous but not clear.” Most likely, this is your own story as well.
“A River Runs Through It” also teaches that these unsettling spaces are more enriching
than crippling because ultimately they can produce a more thoughtful, compassionate, and
productive life. While the waters of a trout stream—our gray spaces—are haunting, just as
important, they also are healing. Living and working there can foster deeper, critical, creative
thinking and problem solving. In our gray spaces we can reframe disparate perspectives and
reimagine conflicts as opportunities for reconciliation and harmony. We can rewrite each of our
complicated and conflicted narratives, as Maclean did, as stories of understanding, acceptance,
and hope. We can open our eyes, ears, minds, and hearts to others, at home, at work, in our local
communities and beyond. The waters of a trout stream, the gray spaces of our lives that both
challenge and inspire us, can disclose common ground and shared human needs, and encourage
civil communication among people who seem irreparably divided. Overall, learning to live and
work there will bring greater value and satisfaction to our personal, professional, and civic roles.
Norman Maclean wrote, “It is not fly fishing if you’re not looking for answers to
questions.” What are the most challenging questions you think about in relation to your work
and life? How are they posed, explored, and in some cases resolved by fly fishing and its most
prophetic writers? How are their stories your own? Much like the haunting questions that
Norman Maclean posed in his story about the parallel journeys of fishing and life, these are the
questions that we can examine in relation to your own lives:
 What is your “calling?”
 Why do the people and things we care most about allude us the most?
 Why do we dwell more on what divides us than what we have in common?
 Why do we hurt the ones we love?
 Why do we dislike the people and ideas we understand least?
 What do we gain and lose as we grow from childhood to adulthood?
 What frightens us about ourselves and others, and why do we avoid rather than face it?
 Why is it so difficult to acknowledge our mistakes, and to ask for and receive help?
 What roles do faith, hope, and courage play in our personal and professional lives?
 What larger, unknown, or unconscious forces may influence our lives?
 How does our thinking and behavior reinforce and enable bad habits?
 How is change both intimidating and liberating, triggering vulnerability and opportunity?
 Why do we strive for perfection and control?
 How do we navigate the boundaries and responsibilities of our private and social lives?
 When do you feel most exhilarated and satisfied, doing and being what’s really “you?”
If fly fishing is about much more than catching fish, then I suggest we are not really living to our
fullest potential if we’re not asking important questions, and then searching within ourselves for
answers.
The full experience of fly fishing—on and off the streams—can serve as an instructive
guide to reading and writing the waters of our lives because it:
 Teaches essential skills and attributes for living, working, and leadership such as
communication, trust, critical thinking, collaboration, conflict management, resilience, —
and agility;
 Sharpens insight, self-awareness, and self-understanding, all essential for personal and
professional growth, and for leadership development;
 Highlights the beauty and instructiveness of the natural world and its ecosystem, which
stimulates reflection, concentration, and integration of human experience and the physical
world;
 Poses difficult questions and exposes deep vulnerabilities in relation to our personal and
work lives;
 Reveals the shortcomings and shadows in our lives that require acceptance,
understanding, and enlightenment;
 Illuminates and reframes confusion, uncertainty, vulnerability, complexity,
disappointment, failure, and loss;
 Reinforces the collective value of experience, reflection, practice, and application in
producing enduring, reliable learning;
 Yields the insight, humility, and courage to change and heal, physically, emotionally,
intellectually, and spiritually;
 Provides a safe, comfortable, and inviting space for honest reflection and conversation;
 Inspires hope and faith, in ourselves, in others, in the work we do, and in the larger
causes we stand for.
Closer to home and the work you do, here are a few questions and circumstances that
may warrant a closer look at fly fishing and its inspiring literature to help you navigate troubled
waters:
 Are you at an important crossroads or dilemma and need help evaluating the situation,
solving a problem, generating options, and making decisions?
 Is something or someone challenging you that you want to understand differently?
 Are you experiencing excessive conflict or stress and you need help in understanding the
sources and solutions?
 Do you want to be more authentic and productive, and want to learn what’s getting in the
way, how to change that, and approach things differently?
 Do you feel stuck and need a change in your personal or work life?
My passion for all things fly fishing is informed by an equally enthusiastic, thirty-year
career in continuing education and adult learning. As teacher, counselor, and dean, I’ve
approached this work using a developmental framework: how we understand ourselves and
make meaning throughout our life cycle, the roles and tasks of adulthood, the changes and
transitions that shape our lives, our relationships with others, and the contributions to the spaces
where we work and live. I’ve come to believe that this framework is analogous to an exploration
of the larger meaning and application of fly fishing to our personal and work lives. The full
experience of fly fishing on and off the stream, including its literature, lessons, and reflections,
supports a set of baseline developmental principles for purposeful, productive living:
 Lifelong learning, especially during times of transition is at the core of purposeful living
and working.
 Identity, intimacy, and generativity are the primary markers for personal and professional
development and the building blocks for all major other life goals. Who are we? What
are our most important personal and professional roles? How do we interact with others?
What do give back?
 Healthy lifelong development is a function of successful individuation. How do we
distinguish ourselves from others? How do we navigate life’s many paradoxes and the
tension of opposites between, for example, private and public, head and heart?
 Willingness to explore the unknown, while exposing vulnerability and apprehension, is a
marker of healthy development.
 Purposeful and satisfying living and working is reflected in how we function in multiple
settings characterized by uncertainty, complexity, and change.
 Personal and professional development is about making meaning of our entire life,
discovering authentic value, and tapping into resources—past and present, conscious and
unconscious, individual and collective—that help us create an honest life story about our
overall purpose.
 Understanding and revising our story often requires confrontation with pain, fear, loss,
and vulnerability in order to yield greater hope, courage, and happiness in all areas of
our lives.
 Personal and professional development requires hard work and practice from the head
and the heart.
 This work is rooted in critical thinking and empathy, and it fosters support for fairness,
equality, and justice.
 Leadership, in many forms, is a central feature of personal and professional development.
Authentic self-awareness and self-understanding build capacity in each of us for selfleadership.
As you think about your own personal and professional development, I encourage you to
read more stories from the stream, starting with, if you haven’t already read it, “A River Runs
Through It.” As you read and reflect, ask yourself:
 How do I relate to these words?
 What do they trigger in my thoughts and feelings?
 How is the story a commentary or observation about my own life?
 What haunting questions, like those inspired by “A River Runs Through It,” do I face?
 What developmental themes are disquieting at this juncture of my career and life?
Here are just a few striking passages to help you get started to create the life story you really
want. Hopefully, like the ending of “A River Runs Through It,” this is only the beginning of a
journey to explore why, inevitably, we are forever “haunted by waters.”
**********
A River Runs Through It, Norman Maclean
For it is true that we can seldom help those closest to us. Either we don’t know what part of
ourselves to give or, more often than not, the part we have to give is not wanted. As so it is those
we live with and love and should know who elude us. But we can still love them—we can love
completely without complete understanding.
Help … is giving part of yourself to somebody who comes to accept it willingly and needs it
badly…. So it is that we can seldom help anybody. Either we don’t know what part to give or
maybe we don’t like to give any part of ourselves. Then, more often than not, the part that is
needed is not wanted. And even more often, we do not have the part that is needed.
Sunrise is the time to feel that you will be able to find out how to help somebody close to you who
you think needs help even if he doesn’t think so. At sunrise everything is luminous but not clear.
Many of us probably would be better fishermen if we did not spend so much time watching and
waiting for the world to become perfect.
**********
What the River Knows: An Angler in Midstream, Wayne Fields
To sit by a river is to enjoy the fittest place for contemplation even as one awaits a struggle with
whatever monster might reside within those depths.

I have maintained … the illusion of control, the dream of constancy. Change has always been
the enemy…. The old dilemma: I want something to happen but nothing to change.
**********
On the Spine of Time, Harry Middleton
Up in the mountains … I let myself drift toward what I like and enjoy rather than what others
believe I need…. Once on the mountain highway, once the road rises out of these foothills and
serpentines about the scalloped slopes of the mountains, things change, sensations change,
priorities change. I change. I gather about me only what seems necessary, fundamental; I
delight in what is basic—a cool wind; clean, fast water; the smell of sweet earth; a fat trout in
deep water…. You take what is given, even the fear…. The fear is real and I fight it with the fly
rod which lets me cast beyond the obvious…. The idea is to concentrate on living rather than
merely surviving.
**********
The Earth is Enough, Harry Middleton
Fly fishing was a great therapy. It kept them nearly sane, out of trouble, usually sober, and
allowed them to pursue a life that, in imagination at least, had no limits or boundaries.
I cast my line, and felt the tug of cold water against my thighs. Always that tug, that urgency of
motion, of life ongoing, resolute. I lost all sense of time, of place, of everything. Concentration
absorbed me. Never had I felt such a consoling aloneness….I knew standing there in that stream
that, from then on, things would be different…. I had changed in some fundamental way that I
could not understand or undo. I felt, too, a sense of actually becoming, belonging. If my life as
a refuge was not over, at least it had changed in both direction and purpose.
**********
Holy Water: Fly-fishing Memories & Remembrances, Jerry Kustich
In my mind, beyond the catching of fish, I have always felt that just being in the wonderful places
that trout—or any fish, for that matter—live is the best therapy for whatever ails the human
soul…. Perhaps it is the multi-dimensional interaction of water, artfulness, and meditative calm
inspired by fly-fishing that is key to its impact on the human spirit. So, upon the realization that
my devotion to spreading the fly-fishing word was more profound than I had ever considered,
maybe my career wasn’t as trivial as I once feared.
And though it is about encountering sacred fish in hallowed waters, I am sure everyone who has
made the journey would agree, it is about so much more.
For some, fly-fishing is a meaningful way to pray in the grand cathedral of nature. For me, it is
that and more.
**********
The View from Rat Lake, John Gierach
The best thing about fly fishing is that it led you inexorably to one paradox after another.
I remember that as one of those profound moments when you realize not only that your father is
actually human, but that even the finest parts of life can hurt you: that it’s possible to want too
much of what you can’t have. Dad died too young, but he was not a tragic character—quite the
opposite, in fact. Still, he never did catch the big fish, and there came a time when I thought I
could see that in his eyes. I’m not saying you shouldn’t go. I think you should go as far and as
often as you can, just don’t go staring off into the trees like that when there are fish to be caught
just five minutes down the road.
**********
The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing, Thomas McGuane
Early on, I decided that fishing would be my way of looking at the world. First it taught me how
to look at rivers. Lately it has been teaching me how to look at people, myself included. To the
reader accustomed to the sort of instructional fishing writing which I myself enjoy, I must seem
to have gotten very far afield. I simply feel that the frontier of angling is no longer either
technical or geographical. The Bible tells us to watch and to listen. Something like this suggests
what fishing ought to be about: using the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater
reverberations within ourselves.
Angling is where the child, if not the infant, gets to go on living.
The more we fish, the more weightlessly and quietly we move through a river and among its fish,
and the more we resemble our own minds in the bliss of angling.
**********
A Flyfisher’s World, Nick Lyons
There is a rhythm to each day we spend on a stream or lake or ocean, and a rhythm to each
fishing year. And there is a discrete rhythm to every fly fisher’s life—though it’s rarely
predictable. Mostly we’re just too busy to notice all the patterns, though it’s well to notice them.
**********
The Habit of Rivers: Reflections on Trout Streams and Fly Fishing, Ted Leeson
Trout streams tug at the mind with an insistent, contradictory pull, presenting both a plain and
perfect simplicity and a subtle link to sources of hidden significance; fundamentally alike, yet
endlessly variable, they offer the solace of the familiar and the inexhaustible fascination of a
thing that can never fully be known.
Fish and fishermen both work upstream, pursuing ends but oriented toward beginnings,
winnowing the extraneous to converge on essentials.
Fishermen, like the rest of humankind, will talk relentlessly and authoritatively about what they
understand least.
I find it impossible to speak about fishing at all without using the word “hope,” because angling
fits into a category of human experience that is rooted more in expectation and possibility than
in some kind of achievement or fulfillment.
I don’t think I’m stretching the matter at all to say that given half a chance, a trout stream can
make you a better person.
Steve Ehrlich
February, 2019