Why You Should Always Make One Last Cast

I was done, having had no luck all day. I’d changed flies, tried different techniques, added weight to sink the midge lower in the water, taken weight off to let another float along the top. I’d matched the hatch and turned to my trusty never fail. I’d thrown everything in the bag at them over several hours. And nothing.

The kicker: it was a crystal-clear day on my favorite river, and I could see fish all around me. But they weren’t taking what I was serving.

Situations like this remind me of my favorite W.C. Fields quote: “If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no point in being a damn fool about it.”

So, I was calling it quits.

Walking out along the creek, I decided to throw one more cast in the direction of a big brown trout I could see nestled behind a rock. It was my most half-assed cast of the day. I literally flipped the rod over as I walked and let the fly plop down on the water with a thud no respectable fisherman would aspire to.

And, WHAP. He took it.

Before I go any further, you should know now that this is not going to be a post about fly fishing. It’s about far a less interesting subject: the stage of success known as quitting.

Fisherman often claim that fishing imitates life. Just as golfers say it about golf, and knitters about knitting. But, in this case, it’s more about how life can imitate fishing.

As some people know, I’ve been writing this blog for quite some time now. I used to write here quite regularly. Even posted weekly, for a while. And, over the years it has been a fun outlet for my creative side and a fine place to chronicle our family adventures – now of great use to my increasingly forgetful mind.

It’s also opened some interesting doors. Because of this dumb blog, I reconnected with some old friends, met some new ones, and, one time, I even got our family a free ski vacation. One of the most interesting things to happen due to this whole blog thing has been my involvement with the Dadbloggers Facebook group and my attendance at the Dad 2.0 Summit – a yearly gathering of dad social media influencers and parenting writers.

One of the 2018 Spotlight Bloggers, Doug Zeigler,

 reading his blog post to the conference.

I’ve gone twice: 2016 in Washington, D.C., and 2018 in New Orleans. Not that I’ve ever influenced anyone. Heck, my kids don’t even listen to me. But I’ve had some great experiences at these conferences, picked up a few writing tips, made those friends I mentioned, and had a lot of fun.

As it happens, each year the organizers of the Dad 2.0 Summit recognize a few bloggers from across the country and have them share a post – as in read it – to the hundreds of people at the conference. It’s the Blogger Spotlight and it’s kind of a big deal.

To become a Spotlighter, a post has to be nominated (most often by the author) and then get selected from a few hundred submissions. And, for the past four or five years, I’ve had posts nominated (most often by the author).

I always wanted to get selected because I looked at it as validation from my peers that I wasn’t totally wasting my time. I also dreamed that it would be one more step on the way to other goals – like writing books, or early retirement.

Yet, it never happened. And, I started to figure it never would. 

Lately, I haven’t exactly been the most prolific writer, by any stretch. As time has marched on and sped up, the ideas just seem to come to me less often, and the opportunity to write passes before I have a chance to funnel my thoughts into a coherent thing worth putting into words.

To be honest, I’ve thought lately about letting this old blog just fade away. I always say to myself when I’m preparing a post, maybe this will be the last one.

I wouldn’t stop creating, altogether. I’d focus on the dumb book I’m halfway finished writing. And I’d tweet, which has much more immediate returns than blogging, from the positive feedback side of the equation.

Maybe it was time, I thought, to quit RuddyBits.

Then, in January, I got a text. Actually, it was a Facebook message – which is now considered old school. It was from one of the Dad 2.0 Summit organizers asking if I’d like to read one of my post as a 2019 Spotlight Blogger.

WHAP.

It made me think again about how, sometimes, it's right when you are ready to walk away that your luck turns around. Some people call it persistence. But it might be something else. But, whatever it is, it can change your perspective.

You know that time on the river, when my last cast of the day landed the fish? It ended up not being my last cast. I kept going.

How can you walk away after something like that, am I right?

So, now I’m headed to San Antonio to read a blog post on parenting. And I imagine, at some point, this damn fool will probably want to write about it.

The Chaos Theory of Parenting

A butterfly flaps its wings in New Zealand, and I end up late for work.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t entirely the butterfly’s fault. It really started, one morning last week, with my eldest daughter and her talent for sleeping through an alarm clock. Literally, this is her super power. An alarm clock could be buzzing right next to her ear, and nothing. Which probably has something to do with her penchant for staying up late to finish homework. Which may or may not have been on abstract mathematics.

Our typical morning routine has a predictable linear structure. (I know it is redundant to call a routine typical, as that’s the nature of a routine, but this is Science not English). Child 1 ostensibly gets up at 6:15 a.m., to be on the bus at 6:52. Children 2 and 3 rise from their slumber when child 1 departs, and they get on their bus at 7:40. That’s when child 4 awakes, his bus arriving at 8:12, which he dutifully boards.

I call this predictable structure the Ordered Family model. And it works well on paper. In reality, it rarely occurs.

Here’s a sample of our reality through the lens of one particular day last week when my wife just happened to be away on business.

And this was the best time of all.

The alarm went off at 6:15 a.m. as planned. Our oldest child didn’t move, however. Unplanned. Then it went off again. And again. When she did finally move, she announced she needed a shower because “it had been a few days.” We have an unwritten rule that we never stop a kid from cleansing themselves. Still, the shower was unplanned. And it ate up precious seconds.

Long story short: she missed the bus. So, of course, I had to drive her. I woke the two younger ones, who are just barely old enough to be left home alone, and ordered them to get ready as I took the eldest to the High School.

When I got back, the house was still standing and everyone was alive, but nobody was ready for the middle school bus, now just moments way. So, I quickly threw together their lunches, prodded them to brush their teeth and get dressed, and then I watched as the bus pulled away while they sat at our counter nonchalantly eating breakfast. Bus missed.

To take them to school, I had to wake the boy, as he cannot be left alone for everybody’s sake. Once his sisters were deposited at middle school. We went back home to get him out of his PJs and ready for his bus, which he missed. So, it was back in the car and to the third school of the day to drop off yet another child.

By the time I got home, I had exactly zero minutes to get showered, dressed and off to work. Needless to say, I was late. Like, really late.

That’s when it occurred to me the similarities between math's Chaos Theory and the way my wife and I are as parents: the Chaos Theory of Parenting.

This theory is not so much a planned philosophy or a framework as an observational reality. And it’s one that can be witnessed by spending even a single morning at our house… or an afternoon… or any given Saturday.

In mathematics, Chaos theory is used to describe dynamic systems where minor variations in initial variables can cause wildly different outcomes. It’s been popularized by the analogy known as the Butterfly Effect: A butterfly flaps its wings and that results in a hurricane half a world away. A little farfetched, I know. But smarter people than I claim it works.

I find it easier to understand Chaos Theory by thinking about the game Plinko on the Price Is Right. That’s the one where the lucky contestant drops a round chip down the Plinko board and it bounces around rather unpredictably until it reaches the bottom. In reality, the reaction of the Plinko chip to its surroundings is quite predictable, scientifically speaking, if you know all the precise variables, which include the speed of the chip, the friction of the board, the angle it hits the first peg, and the second peg, etc. The Chaos comes in when even the slightest variation in any one of those variables dramatically changes the path of the Plinko chip. I like the Plinko analogy because I feel like a Plinko chip going down the board on a daily basis.

The Plinko Theory of Parenting isn't as catchy

The difference is that in Plinko there are only five possible outcomes. While in life, and in parenting, there are infinite. Kid 3 could miss the bus. Kid 2 could leave without gloves and have to stay in for recess. Kid 4 could forget his homework, and his parents could get a call from the teacher. Dad could be late so often that he gets fired, and the whole family could have to move to another state. Anything could happen. All based on Kid 1 sleeping through her alarm and a host of other initial variables.

I tried to explain this to said kids in the car on the evening of the particular day in question.

“Have any of you heard of the Butterfly Effect?” I asked.

“Yes,” replied the high schooler. “Isn’t that how a butterfly on one side of the world can cause a hurricane on the other?”

“Yes!” I responded, almost gleeful.

“Wait,” said the 12-yr-old. “I learned in science that the weather is caused by high and low pressure in the atmosphere?”

“It is,” I stated, trying to think how to marry the two thoughts. “This is before all that."

“What kind of butterfly?” asked the 10-yr-old.

“That doesn’t matter,” I replied.

“So, butterflies cause high pressure fronts?” asked the 12-yr-old, confused.

“I thought you told us once that hurricanes are caused by extreme low pressure,” said the high schooler.

“I did.” God save me. “I was just mentioning the Butterfly Effect to relate it to our mornings and making the bus.”

“What do butterflies have to do with the bus?” asked the 10-yr-old.

“Look, take our typical morning routine…”

“Doesn’t the word routine imply that it’s typical?” pondered the high schooler, in a condescending way.

“Ugh,” I grunted.

The 10-yr-old recollected, "Remember when we went in the butterfly tent at the fair?”

“Yes. Look, it’s just that if one of you misses the bus, it can make me late for work.”

“Um. I still don’t get what this has to do with the weather,” said the 12-yr-old.

“You know what, never mind.”

“I have to pee,” said the 8-yr-old.

So, rather than accurately describing Chaos Theory to my kids, I showed them an example of it in conversation form.

Not that they need to be shown. Because, the truth is, you can look at almost any aspect of our lives and find discernable examples of chaos.

You could be observing us on what seems like an otherwise quiet evening when an unexpected (but predictable) variable occurs, like someone yelling, “Oh My God! We forgot soccer practice!”

And then we suddenly find ourselves scrambling to get our tween to her indoor soccer practice, and the whole plan for dinner is out the window and half our kids are crying because they’re hungry and haven’t started their homework. All because one of us had to run to the store after work to get an ingredient for the dinner we now aren’t making and, in the frenzy, simply forgot it was a practice day.

Come to think of it, the ingredient we were missing was chicken broth. And we were out of it because I'd made soup the day before. I made soup because it was raining. It was raining because of a big storm that had hit the whole coast. So, it may well have been the fault of a butterfly, after all.

Clearly, I have only a rudimentary understanding of the real Chaos Theory, however I’ve found that with proper use of vagueness and big words, anyone can sound like they’re an expert on theoretical mathematics.

Parenting, on the other hand, is not quite so easy.

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