The Workingman’s Example of the Good Life

Finding the Good Life, I believe, is something anyone can do.

A Different Quality of Participation

When I used to blog on Litton’s Fishing Lines, I would sometimes jump right in and produce posts right off the top of my head, posts I value to this day. This one is like that. I had made a note to myself yesterday, when I promised to peruse one of my handwritten journals for ideas and find one to base a post on in the Literature and Philosophy category. This morning, I opened a page at random and saw the possibility on the page before me.

The concern is especially for the example the workingman successful at the good life can be. He can be an example to anyone, but especially to those stuck in the working class who might take up a life of deeper satisfaction. I’ve been there. I’ve worked wage jobs for decades, so it’s personal.

Perhaps most who live the good life engage the outdoors one way or another. Whether alone or with family or friends, the sun overhead is a brilliant companion. As objectively as you may attempt to perceive the sun by quick glances, you can’t help feeling its life-giving quality. That’s literally true, after all. And if it’s cloudy, the suffusion of light equalizes the shadow edges to give you more open space in that way of superseding borders.

Rainy days on the water mean the fish bite better.

But above all else, people participate in the outdoors because the objectives of what they do there are accompanied by sunlight and myriad other objects of aesthetic value, all of which amounts to more coming back of emotional value to them, than they expend in pursuing it. We all have days outdoors that don’t live up to expectations, but we accept even them despite the lack.

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Today’s post does mention the book I’ll soon be struggling to finish, a memoir about recreation and the life of the mind, but I want this post to stand on it’s own. I write presently about the same theme, that commitment to the two can liberate people from their work life. After all, outdoor recreation is nothing without mindfulness, and mindfulness ultimately involves intellectuality. I know fishermen who think intellectuality is for book nerds, but they don’t stop to consider that the obsessive learning process they engage to improve their fishing is intellectual.

Liberation through outdoor recreation may be no outright concern for many professionals. Particularly higher professionals. Even if they’re active outdoors, there’s no sense of a great overcoming, no need for that sense, as there may be for people who find their employment onerous. But even so, among the professional classes, the question may exist: How can I improve the quality of my life? How can I gain a deeper understanding, if I fish or do some other form of outdoor recreation, of the world as it relates to my participation in it?

Virtually all of us participate in outdoor recreation in some form. Even if it’s lying out on the patio. Many people grill outdoors through New Jersey winters. I know, because I used to sell meat.

When you really get down to it, participation in the world is what recreation is all about. In a way qualitatively different from the participation that is work. Work tends to go against the grain of its object in a way that taxes the experience of the worker. Even my working on the present blog post is not pleasant in the way the engrossment, the flow, of experience might develop while fishing, although, admittedly, fishing can be work, too. You hear of it referred to that way on social media and in articles. But every fisherman knows what he’s talking about, when he says, “A day of fishing is better than a day at work.”

Working People and Professionals Alike

Decades ago now, on August 14, 2009—I still remember the date—I committed to writing a book on fishing. A few years passed before I began writing it. Why Fishing Matters grew to 300 well-revised pages before I abandoned it. I believed it was a collection of essays. By that assessment, I had learned, it would never find a publisher. But is it a collection of essays or a fragmented memoir? I didn’t know about the latter form until recently, and my guess is that the book is probably that, not a collection of distinct and unrelated essays.

Will I return to it? I should. If I have time.

The argument of that book is simple and can be summed in one sentence: The workingman can enhance the value of his life by getting out and fishing. Simple and straightforward. But it’s the getting out and enjoying a deep satisfaction that the book speaks to in so many ways. No matter what your job or profession. I felt passionately especially about the possibility for otherwise ordinary people. And I would listen to WNYE while I drove for a credit union, to Gary Null’s concern for ordinary people, that they should not be denied philosophical education through the public schools and should enjoy the good life. My inspiration was my own, but it coincided with that radio talk “show” host’s. (One sees a show, in fact, so somewhere the assumption of seeing the talk through the mind’s eye exists.)

In that book Why Fishing Matters, I persuade through various examples of story the participation in getting out there and doing it, if only for a “short stint,” as I say, of 20 minutes or a half hour. (Just yesterday I fished near home for a fulfilling 25 minutes.) The book encompasses a full scope of why it matters to fish, but my feeling genuinely concerned about the workingman is at its core. His getting short shrift in a society that, among people from its higher classes, might tend to look down the nose on him.

Not only people in the working class feel subjugated. My father was a professional church musician who I once heard blurt out, “The garbageman makes more money than I do!” Someone from the working class, however, can serve as an example, not only of suffering an oppressive work life, but of living the good life in spite of so many odds against doing so. Better than serve anything, however, he lives that life for himself. That’s the best example he can be. Nor do I mean to imply that women can’t do the same, by my limiting the pronoun for the sake of smooth language. Of course not. Transgender people can, of course, find the good life through outdoor recreation, too.

Regarding the informing of any individuals, through my writing I’m striving to move the philosophical concern from sociocultural relativism to not only the objectivity of nature, but our own participation in it. Our geological age is the Anthropocene, in which our influence upon the natural form of the planet is becoming godlike. Just because you might be limited to holding a wage job doesn’t mean you can’t take part. Take part in a way that, instead of doing damage to the world, raises the value of the material to the spiritual.

That’s what the book I do intend to finish fairly soon, The Microlight Quest: Trout, Adventure, Renewal. is about from page one to finish—that unlikelihood of the adventurous, the exceptional, the good life for those of us who have to scrape to get by. That unlikelihood met through the struggle to acquire it despite a weight on us that threatens to limit life to the conditionality experienced while on the clock. I’m an example of such a success, which should be interesting to working people and professionals alike.

It should be interesting, because the story is inspired, and inspiration is infectious. It’s a story created by staying up to 3:00 a.m. while writing after working eight hours in a supermarket, with the bitter edges of Jersey Attitude included. As I said earlier, even people in the upper professions look for ways to improve their lives, not to mention that a story well told engages them as readers.

Primary Identity

I’ve felt classless all my life. I don’t enjoy referring to the “working class” and the “higher classes.” I do so only to designate different types of work and levels of income. And when I say “classless,” I don’t mean I have no “class” in the sense of subtle refinement. You be the judge of that, but what I mean is that while I’ve worked wage jobs since 1993 when I left self-employed commercial clamming behind Long Beach Island, New Jersey, I made a certain choice by which I haven’t identified first and foremost with those wage jobs I’ve taken.

I believe people choose their primary identity, and most associate it with the job or kind of jobs they hold. Whether wage job(s) or upper profession. My choice of primary identity is that of a writer, and it was that even before I began getting published again in 2005. At age 16, I got my first article published, and in addition to 24 more on fishing until I was 19, I got a short story published in a literary magazine at age 17. I went off to Lynchburg College, a good school for writers. There, I put the freelancing aside to focus on becoming a novelist. As it turned out, I became even more interested in philosophy, very much interested in psychology and spirituality, too. Much more than merely interested in books on it.

I look on the handwritten journals I’ve accumulated—hundreds of them—as posthumous writing. Of course I doubt anyone will care enough to publish any of it, but who knows? The point is, I’ve written them every bit as seriously as if they will.

Getting Out

I don’t mean to imply that if you’re stuck in the working class, and you identify as working class, you can’t find any way out. I certainly was stuck there, too. Despite my primary identity being otherwise, I was stuck worse than many. And all day I would think, from time to time, of getting out. If only there were a way to not have to labor in a supermarket!

Many manage, however, to hold well paying working class jobs, yet identify primarily as fishermen or anglers. They’ve beaten the system, because everything else in the world is trying to limit them to being, for example, welders or car salesmen. I know of a welder who does well financially, but he is all-in as a fisherman, before he would identify himself as a welder. He’s not an unusual anomaly. There are a lot of guys, gals too, who find their primary identity not in what they do on the clock, but in what they do while on the water.

Some of you have read my blog posts all through the years I wrote them on Blogger, and if not, those posts still exist as a bold testament to, indeed, managing to get out. Fishing with a passion that takes part in primacy and is only superseded by my identifying as a writer because my ambitions as a writer are greater. Some guys who hold wage jobs fish a lot more than I do, too, but you find very few people—if any others in all the world—who have handwritten hundreds of journal notebooks.

Think of moral philosophers ensconced at universities like Princeton. Philosophers who champion animal rights and by any sensible inference about their possible intentions, want to outlaw fishing. Then think of people whose humanity is seriously frustrated day to day in the working class, but who manage to get out and fish, let’s say at least once a week, and get more than a “taste” of the good life. They actually live it.

I say to those philosophers: You’re are going to take that away from them, because in some way incomprehensible, they’re violating the fish’s…rights? You’re going to tell them to try something else, as if you have that authority, not them?