All in

Jim Rayphand

My card-playing friends tell me (or rather insist) that poker is a game of skill, not luck. I have heard it said, “You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em, know when to walk away, [and] know when to run.”1 I don’t doubt them; in fact, I’ll double down and say that life too is a game of skill though I can’t rule out luck.

While I don’t often play poker, I have “made a life of reading people’s faces [and] knowing what the cards were by the way they held their eyes.”2 I have yet to place a bet that I didn’t win and/or lose, it’s that simple and that complicated—“every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser.”3

I have come to realize, to my dismay (if not astonishment), that I gamble with my life every day; should have played my last hand long ago and “there but for the grace of God go I.” That sounds dramatic, I know, but it’s not exaggerated. The truth is that in life, all of us are all in all the time—it’s just that some are better than others at calling the bluffs on a fine line between fear (the dread in belief that someone or something is dangerous and will likely cause pain) and hope (the confident expectation of something better to come—some call that faith).

For me, there are perhaps no better illustrations of “going all in” than the push and pull of a recent love-interest and the headfirst dive into commercial fishing (on a very small scale) as a profession—somewhat redundant in the fishing nature on both fronts so-to-speak at the wholesale price or rather cost of my body, mind, heart, and soul. On the first front, “Our time here is limited and I give it all to you. Through the stars on a moonless night—hear the whispers it brings—I’m the guide by your side.”4

As for the latter, at the battered age of 50 years old, very much worse for the wear, I walked away from a secure, long-time career of 20-plus years to pursue a childhood dream of wanting “to be a fisherman when I grow up.” Riddled with debt and head just above water, I took my life’s savings, ignored the debt, and bet it all on the ocean around us in arguably the most ill-advised financial gamble ever made and yet one of my proudest endeavors to date. “Not all that glitters is gold”; in fact, not much glitters more than my handcrafted lures and the fish coming aboard my boat in chase.

Being a fisherman today is a far cry from what I imagined or wanted to be as a child. For one thing, I aspired to be like some of my uncles who crafted their own one or two-man wooden canoes and sailed or paddled themselves to and from their fishing grounds. Most of their fishing was done swimming with the fishes, free-diving and spearing for catch. My version today is done trolling from the comforts of bigger fiberglass boats with high-powered engines completely reliant on fossil fuels/petroleum en route to and from my fishing grounds much, much further offshore than I could have ever imagined. Some days I find myself fearing for my life in turbulent, towering waves all around me and other days I am inspired with awe at the beauty and tranquility on an ocean of glass with no land in sight—always in search of my elusive white whale. I find peace in the solitude.

For a little over a year now I have found myself in rough waters (both literally and figuratively) with the mind and heart in constant battle over doing what I need to do (doing what’s right, if you will) versus doing what I want to do—the line is blurry from the view through my salted eyes and motion of the ocean.

I suspect there are many more life lessons to be deemed from my fishing ventures (whether in the sea or on land) than my limited brain and hopeless heart can ascertain. More than likely my journey will present textbook cases of what not to do (and how we can learn from mistakes), but from somewhere in the darkness from many of life’s storms I found some aces that I keep (in the words of people far more wise than I ever could be):

• “No storm, not even the one in your life, can last forever” (Unknown);

• “Every storm runs out of rain, just like every dark night turns into day” (Unknown);

• “When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain” (Unknown);

• “We can only learn to love by loving” (Unknown);

• “And above all things have fervent love for one another, for “love will cover a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8)

Some people love to fish, others fish for love, but the luckiest among us simply fish with love…come what may.

1 Kenny Rogers’ song, The Gambler
2 Kenny Rogers’ song, The Gambler
3 Kenny Rogers’ song, The Gambler
4 Ben Rayphand’s Time Limited

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Jim Rayphand is a former executive director of the Northern Marianas Protection and Advocacy Systems Inc. and recently ventured into a startup fishing business.