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It is said that when the student is ready, the teacher appears.

A few years ago, I found myself in a difficult spot. I was surrounded by noise: it seemed I needed more of everything and yet nothing that I got made me happy. I recall feeling overwhelmed and yet very empty at the same time. It was a classic situation of water water everywhere.

In a feeble attempt to clear my head, I began to clean my son’s toy room. As I was putting away his books and toys, I found a bunch of Indian comic books lying around. I picked up the one about Arjuna, a talented prince in Hindu mythology. My younger son is named after this brave warrior prince and I thought perhaps I could read my son the story that night. Turns out the lesson applied to me more than it applied to my son: The story opens with a teacher, guru Dronacharya, training a group of royal Indian princes, the Pandava brothers, in the art and skill of archery. The guru ties a fish to the branch of a tree. He then calls all the warriors and says to them, “See that bowl of oil placed below the fish? I want you to aim your arrow at the fish’s eye, while looking only at its reflection in the oil below.”

“Oh, this would be easy,” the princes said out loud.

The oldest prince, Yudhistra, came first, ready with his bow and arrow, and the guru asked, “What do you see?” He answered, “I see the fish, the leaves …” 
The guru shook his head. “You are not ready. Move on.”

The next prince came up and the guru asked him the same question. He responded that he saw the sky in the bowl of oil. He was asked to move on. 
The third one saw the fish, the branches and fruit. The fourth one saw the leaves and the oil. They were both asked to step aside.

Finally, it was Prince Arjuna’s turn. 
“What do you see?” asked the guru. 
“I see the eye of the fish.”

The guru smiled and gave Prince Arjuna the order to shoot. The ace archer’s arrow pierced the eye of the fish.

The story hit home for me. I was focused on the sky, the branches, the numbers, the followers, the echo of praise gone by and the hollowness of the feared future when what I needed to do was focus on the moment at hand and what it demanded of me. For me that meant working on a dream writing project.

What is your moment at hand? Are you focused on the sky, the leaves, the fish? What do you need to be focused on? What is your “eye of the fish”?