Nothing Was Biting And I Stayed Anyway

I went out early Saturday and caught nothing.

Not a bite. Not a nibble worth setting a hook on. Three and a half hours on the water and the only thing I brought home was a wet seat and a sunburn on one side of my neck.

Ten years ago that would have ruined me.

I used to measure a morning by what I had to show for it. If I came back empty I had wasted the time, and wasted time felt like a debt I would have to pay somewhere else. So I would fish harder. Change the lure. Move the boat. Stay until I forced something to happen, then come home tired and short with everybody and no better off than when I left.

That is not fishing. That is arguing with a lake.

Here is what I have had to learn slowly.

There was a stretch of years where waiting was done to me. Not chosen. Done. Waiting on a door. Waiting on a letter. Waiting on somebody else to decide how long the waiting would last. When you spend enough time in that, stillness stops feeling like rest and starts feeling like something being handed to you on purpose.

So I came home and filled every hour. Built things. Answered things. Kept the noise up so the quiet could not get a word in.

The water undid that.

Because on a slow morning the lake does not owe you anything. It is not withholding. It is not testing you. The fish are somewhere and you are here and the sun comes up either way. There is nobody on the other side of it deciding what you deserve. That is the difference between the waiting that was done to me and the waiting I choose, and it took a long time before my body could tell the two apart.

Now I go out and I do not much care if the cooler stays empty.

I watch the fog come off the water. I listen to the first truck out on the road. I think about the week and I do not try to solve it. Somewhere around the second hour my shoulders drop about an inch, and that inch is the whole reason I drove out there.

I am not going to dress that up as a spiritual breakthrough. Some mornings I sit out there and my head is loud the entire time and I go home the same man I was. Some mornings it works. I have stopped keeping score on that too.

But I know this much. A man who cannot sit still with nothing happening is a man who can be moved by anybody willing to make something happen. I was that man. Rushed, reactive, easy to steer. I have no interest in going back to him.

So I keep going out when nothing is biting.

Not because I am patient. Because I am practicing.

The fish will be there another day. So will the work. So will everything I think is going to fall apart if I take four hours off, and it never does.

Sit in it a while.

That is all I have got today.