Preparing for Results

Preparing for Results

I have been in Cape Town, from November until January. My favourite place to go is about two hours north from Cape Town, a place called River Edge. Here’s my story:

I usually keep my River Edge time for me; it’s my getting away from it place, where I feel whole and complete – the land, air and water satisfying my daily needs. On this last visit, however, I opened the gates for others to come and visit, breaking the curfew that I had set as a standard for my monastic period.

What an interesting and somewhat disturbing feeling started to brew up after gifting those words of experimentation which opened the gates of Siddhartha’s palace. I mean, in this place I don’t have any arguments, I don’t stress around time, nudity is perfect for most of the day, I eat what I want when I want and it goes on. So I guess that was the challenge, to maintain this equilibrium with others around.

My thoughts started to consider what they may like to eat, what would interest them and did I have enough for them? I recognised that I would have to include them in my meditation and by doing that I was starting to prepare for a successful experience.

One of the events I thought the two delightful kids would enjoy (plus their mother) is a fishing session or two on the river. I hadn’t fished this section of The River Breede before, so I needed to prepare the water to be sure of catching something.

How do you prepare for results, when you don’t know what will happen?

Some knowledge of the environment that your target audience prefers, plus an idea of the habits they enjoy. I know that Carp like clean gravel or sand, where they can feed easily, combined with some natural protection and a depth of water. Therefore I got into my swimmers and started to dive into the river, checking out where the perfect spots would be. I swam to the bottom, felt the bottom and checked all the different depths around my chosen area.

Then I marked out those areas and fed those areas at least three times a day. After a day and a half I set up a rod and waited. After a short time, the line ripped off the reel spool and i was into my first fish.

By the time the family came, I was ready for eating, fishing, swimming and relaxing – all built into the meditations I had been doing beforehand. When we went fishing, I took the boat out (usually an accident waiting to happen with four people and two long fishing rods in a small wooden boat). I cast out the first rod for the eager boy and it wasn’t two minutes before the line zipped off and he was into a fish. Then we caught for the girl and the mother within 20 minutes. Every person had caught a fish (and good sized fish up to 7kgs) and we went back to the outside Jacuzzi in a very happy mood.

The basic knowledge of the target, plus an idea of their habits, then preparing for success works every time. It’s just whether we can be bothered to make that kind of effort and take responsibility for what we get into the net.

And the final beauty from this preparation was I felt totally myself and had even more fun than I usually had – even by those high standard of satisfaction I already had by myself.

Preparing for Results