I didn’t get into fishing to be good at it.
I didn’t start because I wanted numbers, limits, or bragging rights. Half the time I don’t even remember what I caught. What I remember is the waiting. The quiet. The feeling that, for once, nothing needed to happen.
Fishing showed me something modern life never did: patience isn’t passive — it’s a skill.
And it’s one most of us have completely lost.
Productivity ruined my ability to wait
Somewhere along the way, everything became about output.
If you aren’t producing something, optimizing something, or improving something, you’re “wasting time.” Even rest has rules now. Even hobbies have to justify themselves.
Fishing doesn’t care about any of that.
You can’t rush it.
You can’t force it.
You can’t “grind” your way to a bite.
You show up, you cast, and then you wait.
At first, that waiting made me uncomfortable. I’d check my phone. Recast too often. Move spots too quickly. I treated fishing like every other task — something to be completed.
It never worked.
Waiting is the whole point
Eventually, something shifted.
I stopped trying to make fishing productive and started letting it be what it actually is: time spent paying attention. To the water. The wind. The sounds around me. My own thoughts slowing down.
That’s when fishing started to feel less like an activity and more like a state of mind.
It reminded me of what I wrote about in Why I Don’t Fill Every Free Moment Anymore — how constantly needing to “do something” slowly burns you out without you realizing it.
Fishing demands stillness. And stillness exposes you.
There’s nowhere to hide when you’re just sitting there, line in the water, doing nothing. Thoughts come up. Restlessness shows itself. You realize how trained you are to avoid silence.
Patience isn’t laziness
Modern culture treats patience like a weakness.
But patience isn’t quitting.
It isn’t giving up.
It isn’t being unmotivated.
Patience is choosing not to rush what doesn’t need rushing.
Fishing taught me that you can be fully engaged without being busy. That you can care deeply about something without controlling it.
That lesson carried into other parts of my life — parenting, gardening, even downtime at home. The same mindset shows up when I’m sitting outside doing absolutely nothing, something I wrote about in The Difference Between Rest and Escaping.
Rest isn’t checking out.
It’s checking in.
You don’t “win” at fishing — and that’s why it matters
There’s no scoreboard.
No algorithm.
No reward for efficiency.
Some days you catch nothing. Some days you catch one fish after hours of waiting. And somehow, those are often the best days.
Because fishing isn’t about the result — it’s about allowing time to move at its own pace.
That’s something I keep coming back to across this site, whether I’m writing about getting lost on a bike, sitting quietly in the yard, or choosing a slower life on purpose. Like I said in Why I Choose a Slower Life, not everything meaningful has to scale, optimize, or grow.
Some things just need space.
What fishing gave back to me
Fishing gave me permission to stop forcing myself to be productive all the time.
It reminded me that:
- waiting isn’t wasted
- silence isn’t empty
- stillness isn’t failure
In a world obsessed with speed, fishing is an act of quiet resistance.
You don’t need to be a fisherman to understand that lesson. You just need something — anything — that teaches you how to wait again.
For me, it just happened to be a line in the water and time moving slow enough to notice.
– Just a note from the yard.