Fishing

The beautiful thing about fly fishing is the process. You never eat the trout, you rarely even take a picture unlesss you need something to send to your mom. It’s purely for sport.

What most people don’t understand is that you spend all winter tying the flies. While the trout are hibernating you’re at home with a magnifying glass and tweezers making bait. To make it economical you need to tie about 300 flies in the winter otherwise you’ve spent more on materials than the equivalent expense of buying flies at a shop.

Because no reasonable person could ever expend 300 flies in a season you also have to spend the winter recruiting friends into the sport. So you do this for 6 months, tying flies and selling friends on the experience all in anticipation of the spring day when the snow melts.

Finally it happens, the sun melts the snow and the nymphs begin to hatch. Your friends come out and freeze themselves in the water with you. If you’re lucky you spend more time catching trout than you spend untangling your friends line.

And there’s really no purpose to any of it. You just do it because what else are you supposed to do when there’s fish in the water and you have time on your hands.

There’s no winning. There’s no losing. There’s only the process: which you can iterate on endlessly, fruitlessly, and relentlessly. And yet man does what he’s always done, caught the fish. And watched the time roll past him.