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9 Chapter Nine: Chasing Minnows

When I was young, my aunt and uncle lived near a lake in which we could swim and play. One of my favorite things to do was chase minnows with a small net about four inches across. My tendency at the beginning was to find a school of fish and chase the whole thing. As I did, the fluid, darting mass invariably avoided my net by successively splitting in two as I moved my net through the middle, hoping to catch a few. As each split occurred, I had to make a choice as to which half I would pursue. This would continue until I was chasing a single fish. It was not until that happened that I felt like I was finally chasing something definitive, and that if I relentlessly focused my attention and energy on it I might catch it (which I sometimes did). Before that focus on a single fish, I felt like I was chasing a cloud that kept vanishing in front of me.

I often thought of this experience later as I came to understand the tendency toward “chasing it all” in life. In general, you must determine your top priority and realize there may come times that other priorities will be sacrificed to achieving it. Rightly is it written, “No one can serve two masters.” But we tend to have many, competing priorities and often want to take compromise measures that we hope will let us “catch lots of the minnows” at once. If we do that, we will often come to a time when the needs of the priorities split and a compromise measure will place us between the two splitting priorities—and we will come up empty.


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