The reward for humility and fear of the Lord is riches and honor and life. - Proverbs 22:4

If I could spend a day fishing with my younger self, there would be so much I’d have to say about life, about perspective, about priorities, about faith, and about fishing. But to get to the brass tacks, everything would really boil down to just this…

Get humility above all else, and all you really need on your hat are a hare’s ear nymph and an Adams.

I don’t know how it works for most folks, but for me it has taken getting older to bring life into perspective. Only now is there enough quiet in my life to allow room every day for God, for thinking, for reflecting. Only now can I frame the regret of my youth into an understanding that the inability to get out of my own head was the biggest obstacle of my days; The inability to understand that it is impossible to find happiness and contentment outside of God’s leading in my life. Only now can I see how simple, beautiful, and brief life is.

When I first started fly fishing, everything was difficult. The knots, the fly selection, knowing what streams to fish or how to fish them; understanding how to read water, knowing the insects, or how to properly cast or make a drift. I thought all I had to do was look like Paul Maclean on the water and I’d catch trout.

Like everything in my life, I was oblivious to the idea that Less is More. We fill our lives with so many distractions. We willingly sacrifice our lives on the alter of selfishness; We are the hero of our daily story where every paragraph is about ourselves. We take that same attitude to the trout stream, approaching fly fishing focused on the next selfie with a trout and armed with the latest gear to make us the most prolific netters of trout the river has ever seen.

I’ve found the ability to control my ego to be the biggest struggle of my life. That unrelenting need to be in control, to win, to succeed, the be right, to know more, and to do it my way. I never recognized it as ego, but rather as confidence, as what set me apart. Never once recognizing that this was the most debilitating influence on my happiness, and was an unrecognized obstacle to all my closest relationships.

And I carried that ego with me onto the hunting field and trout stream – making the experience about what I accomplished instead of allowing myself to simply be a part of the nature around me.

Learning to quiet my mind and deliberately take a step back has been the single best intentional thing I’ve done in my life, as well as the most difficult.

Realizing how big God is, and how small I am. Realizing we are simply stewards of what we have been given. Realizing the work of our hands and the talent of our mind is an investment in us from above for His Will, not our own doing for our benefit alone.

But make no mistake, both Life as a whole and the trout stream dole-out humility in heaping handfuls. Every fly fisher knows this. Learning to accept these doses of perspective as teaching and reminders of our place in creation, instead of as points of frustration, is key.

The stream flows gently over and around the rocks, originating from some mysterious place just out of sight. The wind rustles the rhododendrons and the white oaks overhead causing the sunlight to dance upon the pool just above the riffle. In the pockets of light mayflies dance upon the water, and a trout rises.

A gentle cast from the three-weight lands the size 14 Adams fifteen feet above where the trout sipped the surface. A gentle mend to the 6x tippet aligns the drift with the splatter of sunlight. As the Adams leaves the shade and enters the beam of light, it disappears, sucked beneath the surface.

A lift of the rod sets the hook. The trout dives at first, then races to the tail of the pool. A tug of the line turns him and he breaks the surface and the silence of the stream. Back to the middle of the pool he is guided, then methodically to the net.

The trout is lifted from the water, its bright rainbow, silver skin, black spots, and hues of green glimmer in the late day light. The rhododendrons wave, the birds sing, the stream continues by. The hook removed, the trout returns to the depth of his pool. Calm returns to the water.

There is no audience here; and in the silence of the moment you are reminded of the perfection of nature, of the value of wild places, and the humility of it all.