When I was younger, I use to think fishing was a waste of time and effort. It was such a pessimistic view based off the failure to understand that sometimes the reasons for doing things are not always so apparent but yet they have this knack of crystalizing in hindsight. It was a leisure activity my dad has always made a concerted effort to set aside for most Saturday mornings and I kinda just went with the flow.

Now that I’m older, I realize that the fishing wasn’t always necessarily about what came or didn’t come back attached to the end of the line or even the sudden jolts that gave you the impression that you had chosen the ideal spot to cast from. The entire experience was and continues to be about learning to wait, to be patient, to follow protocol, to be still, with your thoughts and to acknowledge that not everything we set out to accomplish will be under our control which more often than not is easier to say than to accept.

Everyday that we go out into the world it responds back to us with thousands of choices for us to make and now more than ever we find ourselves in a situation where that last thing we feel we don’t have is control. Where there’s no control there’s at least hope and there’s belief that what we’re experiencing at this moment is a season that we’ll all get through together. 

For the time being the very least that we can do is to play our part but also as some scholars have suggested, to “write things down.”  “Think of your children, your grandchildren, your friends down the road, who will ask you what was it like during that pandemic.”