The Girl Who Fished With a Straight Hook
By: Camille Cusumano
Tags: Happiness, Heros Journey, Tango, Travel, Fairy Tale

The Girl Who Fished With a Straight Hook

An Eight-fold Path to Happiness Right Now

Photo by Ben Wilkins on Unsplash

There was a girl who fished with a straight hook. Others laughed at her. “Why are you fishing with a straight hook, foolish girl?” She kept fishing that way. She fished her whole life with a straight hook. Eventually, she was old and white-haired, still fishing with a straight hook.

In a far away land, a Prince heard about this strange woman who had wasted her life fishing with a straight hook. He was curious and wanted to meet her. So he had his servants prepare for the long journey to where she constantly fished. He found her one morning casting her straight hook.

“Excuse me, Madame. Can you tell me what it is you hope to catch with a straight hook?”

The old, white-haired woman turned to the Prince, her face, sweet, all-knowing. She smiled and said, “You, my Prince.”

Photo by Ravi Patel on Unsplash

Let me tell you about the part of the story I’ve left out. Let’s say that we’re all that girl. Let’s say that the straight hook is our personal way of “fishing” for happiness. At some point in our lives we realize we’re not catching the fish that most Americans consider their blood right: happy marriage, great kids, loads of money, lots of possessions.

No matter how much the conventional-curved-hook people — the Mad Men, politicians, the cultural know-it-alls — laughed at me I had become used to fishing with that straight hook. Then one day, the Prince showed up, not in the form of an actual man. Unlike the old woman, I didn’t instantly recognize that this Prince was what I’d waited for my whole life.

What the tale leaves out is the Perfect Storm the girl/woman has to undergo before she can recognize the Prince — you know, the full catastrophe living. The archetypal fall from grace. My perfect storm was pretty mundane — I left my cushy magazine editor job, lost my partner of many years because I was out taking tango lessons every single night. Then pulled the other woman’s hair; packed up and left town — to go live in South America.

On August 27, 2006, with blood in my eye and hair under my fingernail, I arrived in Buenos Aires. Along with three suitcases, I had brought my shame, broken heart, and adequate tango skills. Despite my tango obsession, I hated the dance for how it had wrecked my life. It was poison, I told a tango friend. He said it was also my medicine — “Tango will save your life,” he said.

Before I left home, one of my Zen teachers, Reb Anderson, gave a lecture. He said that a crisis, was opportunity + challenge — that the Chinese character for crisis integrated both those characters. To my surprise, Reb and his wife were in my first tango classes. Reb, an adept Zen master of many years, said he agreed to take tango with his wife, because, “we need to train in anxiety and darkness.”

ANXIETY AND DARKNESS. Those words fully described my life outside the dance circle. I had intended to stay in Argentina two and a half months. But after day-in-day-out dancing tango, a dance that elevates the common hug to an art form, I canceled my return ticket. I stayed a year and a half then. I didn’t just feel good dancing tango. I began to notice the euphoric effects I had long sought elsewhere — fishing with my straight hook as it were.

I began to recognize what My Prince”referred to — not a darkly handsome Argentine. The vulnerability of giving yourself over to stranger after stranger seemed to work like a homeopathic remedy. I had entered the realm of tango only half-interested. But when it took over my life, I felt so at home with it, as if it were a long lost relative. I began to recognize that My Prince referred to the joy within, the joy I was always capable of knowing.

What is it about tango that can do this to a person?

Tango won’t make you rich materially, won’t promise you anything. Certainly most partner dances induce a flow of endorphins, a cozy feeling of intimacy, shared energy, and the beauty of having music move you.

Argentine tango is a dance of improvisation. It’s likened to a language in that it has a simple basic vocabulary of steps — -walking, figure eights, turns, and crosses (of feet).The difficulty of dancing tango is legendary. “It takes a lifetime and a half to learn tango,” the Argentines say. The intimacy of tango is like that of no other dance. You enter a warm cocoon with another; torso to torso you create a 3-minute fairytale. You share a nervous system, a friend told me.

Because of its improv nature, I tell my students, you learn tango from the feet up but dance from the heart down. I tell them that everyone finds their own tango, that Every Body has got tango, that they will find their own secret about the dance.

What is mine?

In tango, the leaders, usually men but not strictly, are told that they are the prime movers and they must clearly communicate their intentions — if anything goes wrong they are 100 percent at fault. The followers are told to WAIT for the lead, to NOT anticipate. To not think, to remain present. In essence, to hang out. It took me more than a year to believe tango rapture was that SIMPLE.

What actually happens in tango is that leaders START the dance, then follow the follower. Leaders, too must hang out, remain present, embrace what is offered, not anticipate. In short, to paraphrase my Zen teacher, Reb, when people stop being leaders and followers, there is just a dance.

This leads to my deepest Secret.

My Secret is what I call the Hover Zone or the Gap — that which you don’t do in tango, that which is the negative space of tango. So much of tango was about unlearning — to anticipate, to think, to know. To engage with tango you have to be vulnerable and open to your soft, ripe center.

So, in tango I found this little secret ungraspable, unnameable, Cheshire-grin of a place, ever-shifting, never fixed, I call it the Hover Zone, in which I wait physically and mentally. It takes muscle. In that zone, nothing happens until the leader invites me. There is no thought, yet I’m fully engaged, fully present. Clock time is gone.

I think of the Hover Zone, as real time. The sensation is exactly what I had sought for two decades of sitting silent meditation. When we put emphasis on the Gap, the boundless, empty space, of any human endeavor or enterprise, we get a 360-degree-panoramic, unobstructed view of Earth, the Moon, of Everything. And everything fits perfectly just as it is.

This was and still is my tango secret.

We have a word, “pschyo-somatic” that describes how the mind affects the body. I think we need the reverse word, somatic-psyche, say, that explains how body opens & instructs the mind. This in short is what happens in tango. That spaciousness of body and mind followed me off the dance floor. That’s the Prince.

Whether you play marbles, race cars, raise children, or run a country, the Prince is available to all of us. We all have to breathe.

In tango, as in yoga, we learn to prepare on the inhalation, to execute the move on the exhalation. Between the in and the out breaths lies the Gap, the Hover Zone, no matter what you are doing. Find that sweet spot. Find your tango whatever it is. My 8-fold path or guidelines:

1. Try. Fail, Try again.

2. Remain present — There is this muscle called “waiting.”

3. Surrender ego — surrender means you leave it at the door– you get it back, like your gun, when you leave the club.

4. Clear your mind — actively let thoughts arise and go, a cinch when your body is pressing into another.

5. Hone strengths — only you can know what those are — if it’s fishing with a straight hook, don’t let anyone or their laughter sideline you.

6. Embrace obstacles — this might mean embracing others’ laughter or your own failures; and especially your own vulnerability. If you get this far you know there is really one obstacle: yourself.

7. Transform failure, or obstacles — you do this by “dancing” with them. You have the power to turn your oops into an ahhhhh.

8. Know happiness, aka the Prince, be at home with it; go to sleep with it; wake up to it; know it for the long lost relative or home place that has always been there for you.