I have three grandchildren now, two boys and one girl. The second born was Rhys and we doted on him constantly when he was just so little. He seemed to take it all in like it was normal and expected. He had a calm way of expressing himself. It was almost as though he had years of experiences in life when he was just two years old. My wife described him best as being an old soul. But for all of that he was still young then and had a normal toddler’s limited vocabulary.
If I was playing with him while he was coloring I might ask him why he used a green crayon to color a tree. He didn’t have the words at hand to express himself, yet of course he knew because most trees are green. He tried to answer in the simplest way a youngster leans towards when it’s something they know at heart but just can’t put into finite words. It’s a clear feeling he had and his one-word response would be “Cudge.” This was his attempt, at his early age, of trying to say the word “because.” Though he couldn’t voice the word exactly, he sure felt the true meaning of it.
It could be the middle of January and I might ask Rhys why should we put our coats on before going outside. Real simple answer, “Cudge.” That one word covers why he should put his coat on and perhaps with a little vehemence to say that if we don’t follow suit implied by Cudge then some unpleasant things would occur. To Rhys, Cudge covered the gamut of common sense, the “I don’t have to say it in words but it is entirely true because I just know it to be.”
It was Henry David Thoreau who once wrote, “Many a man can fish his whole life without realizing that it is not the fish that he is after.” I am a fisherman. I truly enjoy going fishing on a regular basis. If for some reason I was in a courtroom being questioned by Judge Thoreau, with him asking why it is that I fish, he’d get to asking me at some point if I was often hungry and sought to catch fish so that I could eat them. This might serve to answer the question of why I go. Alas, I’m not starving, so that isn’t the clear-cut answer that I can put into words and end the cross examination.
This does get me wondering though. So what if I’m not hungry to eat a fish today. Perhaps my ancestors were hungry for whatever they could find that was edible. If it was a fish, then they had to find a way to catch it. They spent time devoted to catching fish, using what methods and tools they had to do so. They did this to answer that pang of hunger they had. Maybe a village or community or large family counted on them to be successful with their fishing to provide the bounty for the group to live by. The ones that were good at fishing and other methods of food gathering survived to pass these traits and ideas onto the next generation.
So just maybe there’s this big “pull” in some people, a pull that calls on them to get out on the water and try to catch. With continued pull like this through the generations, this striving to go fishing may have become instinctive to a certain extent. And just like in, say, the breeding of dogs for certain instinctive traits that are desired, there is clear variation within the offspring as to how strong these traits are passed on. Each puppy is different. Some have it more than others.
So maybe this drive in me to go fishing so often is not entirely my doing; perhaps it’s ancestral. The unknown reason for this desire to go may be my way of answering my ancestors who planted that seed of an idea. The idea to use what methods and tools that I have to go, to catch fish, and to bring them back to the family. The constant barrage of this type of message going out to those that could fish well perhaps, just perhaps, became a piece of the fabric that we call common sense in the human psyche.
And just like most pieces of common sense that we carry, we can’t always point to the perfect explanation of why we do something without spawning another collection of questions as to why. So maybe if Judge Thoreau were to ask why it is that I fish as often as I’ve done in my life, I will be best served by borrowing Rhys’ response and simply reply “Cudge.”