Nobody on the Water Asks for My Side of the Story

Out on the water, nobody asks for my side of the story.

I did not understand how much I needed that until I had it again.

For a long stretch of my life, every room I walked into wanted an explanation. Who I was. What I did. What I meant by it. What I would say next. Some of those questions were fair. A lot of them were not asking for an answer. They were asking for a performance.

You learn to keep your guard up. You learn to rehearse. You learn to hear the next question before it is asked.

A lake does not do any of that.

The water does not keep a file

An East Texas morning on the water asks for very little. Watch the line. Read the wind. Keep your feet under you. Be patient or go home with nothing.

It does not care what anybody wrote about me. It does not care what I wrote back. It has no comment section.

That is the part people miss when they hear a veteran say fishing helps. It is not the fish. Half the time there are no fish. It is the hours where the only thing that matters is what is right in front of you.

Quiet is not the same as empty

When I first got home, quiet scared me a little. Quiet used to mean something was about to happen. My body had learned that, and it took its time unlearning it.

So I did what a lot of men do. I filled every quiet minute. Work. Phone. Projects. Noise.

The water was where I started letting quiet be quiet again. Not all at once. One morning at a time. Sitting still without bracing for the next thing.

I am not going to tell you a boat fixed my PTSD. It did not. Nothing fixes it in one move. What the outdoors did was give me a place to practice not being on guard, in a setting where being on guard buys you nothing.

What I bring back to the house

I am a father again. My son Thomas David will grow up around a man who has had to learn how to be still.

I want him to have a dad who can sit on a bank with him and not need to talk. Who does not flinch at quiet. Who does not need every hour to prove something.

I cannot hand him that if I never practiced it myself.

So I go back out. Not to escape. To rehearse being the man I want at home.

The verse I carry out there

Genesis 50:20 says what was meant for harm, God meant for good. I do not read that as a promise that the hard years were secretly fine. They were not.

I read it as a promise about what comes after. The harm happened. The good is still being built. And some of it gets built in the slow hours, on the water, where nobody is asking me to explain myself.

If you are carrying a file around in your head that you never asked for, find a place that does not care about it. A lake. A trail. A back porch at first light.

Sit there long enough, and you might remember who you were before everybody started asking.