Catching Fish

Hey hi. This week I’m sharing with you one of the many brilliant ideas from one of my favorite directors, David Lynch, whose spirit passed into a new realm this week. In the video below, he explains, “We don’t really create an idea. We just catch them, like fish.”

Here’s more on this concept of ideas as fish from his autobiography Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity:

Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you've got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They're huge and abstract. And they're very beautiful. I look for a certain kind of fish that is important to me, one that can translate to cinema. But there are all kinds of fish swimming down there. There are fish for business, fish for sports. There are fish for everything. Everything, anything that is a thing, comes up from the deepest level. Modern physics calls that level the Unified Field. The more your consciousness - your awareness - is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source, and the bigger the fish you can catch. My thirty-three-year practice of the Transcendental Meditation program has been central to my work in film and painting and to all areas of my life. For me it has been the way to dive deeper in search of the big fish.

While Lynch’s dive into source is through transcendental meditation, I think learning to be still, regardless of the method, is the key. Just like in real fishing beside a river or stream, a fisherman must sit still long enough for the fish to swim close enough to be caught. We must sit still long enough for the big ideas of our lives to swim to the surface.