Before the heat wakes up

There is a stretch of morning in East Texas right now, early September, where the heat has not woken up yet.

The water is flat. The bugs have not organized. The sky is a color that does not have a name and does not need one.

I go out in it when I can.

Not to catch anything. I catch things sometimes. That is not why I go.

I go because it is the only hour of the day that does not want something from me.

For a long time I could not do this. Not the fishing part. The sitting part.

Sitting still used to feel like losing. If I was not moving, something was going wrong somewhere and I was not on top of it. That is what years of being on alert does to a man. Your body learns that stillness is the moment before something bad, and it never quite unlearns it on its own.

So you have to teach it. On purpose. Over and over.

Here is what nobody tells you about recovery. It is not a door you walk through. It is a repetition.

You sit down on the water. Your chest tightens for no reason. You stay anyway. Nothing bad happens. You go home.

Next week you do it again. Chest tightens a little less. You stay. Nothing bad happens.

That is the whole treatment. It is boring. It works.

I have had people tell me I should be further along than I am. I have told myself that too, usually around three in the morning, which is a bad hour for accurate self-assessment.

But the honest measure is not how fast. The honest measure is whether you went back out.

I keep going back out.

There is a verse people put on coffee mugs about God meaning for good what men meant for evil. I have quoted it plenty. I will keep quoting it.

But mugs leave out the part that matters, which is that Joseph said it at the end. Not in the pit. Not in the prison. At the end, looking back, with the whole thing finally visible.

In the middle you do not get the summary. You get the morning. You get flat water and an hour that does not want anything from you and the choice to sit in it.

That is not nothing. Some seasons that is the entire assignment.

The heat will wake up. It always does. There will be phone calls and filings and invoices and a hundred things that need a decision by noon.

But not yet.

Right now the water is flat and I am still here and that is enough to be going on with.

Go find your hour. Whatever it is. Then go find it again tomorrow.

That is the work.