When the fish are biting I stop noticing everything else around me. My eyes are focussed on my line and my hands are sensitive to the least little pull on the pole. I’m in the moment completely. When the fish are not biting, when they are ignoring my fancy lures and could care less about my elegant casts, the world comes back in. At first, all I wanted to do was to get back to that peak state of fish-catching, but lately I have been enjoying being just as present in the scenery that surrounds me. Watching the sunrise over an oceanside beach or set over the bay. Noticing the osprey as she flaps her giant wings and glides in big loops overhead or the resident snapping turtle making his early morning rounds of the circumference of the pond (uncomfortably near my bare legs). Letting myself be amazed by hundreds of pogies swirling in an underwater moshpit just yards offshore. Being in the moment, whatever that moment has to offer, has extended the pleasure I get in fishing from a few highs to the entire experience.
Like catching fish, victories in activism are few and far between. This is why it is important to not just learn to live with the process of activism — the meetings, the strategy sessions, the actions, the postmortems — but to learn to love it. This can be hard sometimes, as anyone who has sat through a multi-hour planning meeting can attest. It’s easy to focus on the droning self-important pontification and the excruciating procedures of democracy and wish it was all over and done with so we could just move on and get out on the street. But being stuck in a meeting wishing and hoping you could be somewhere else means missing what is there at the moment. There is real beauty in a group of people coming together and sharing their ideas in order to change the world and it’s important to notice and appreciate this as well. In the words of LSD-laced professor turned yogi Ram Dass: “Be Here Now.” Being present, however, does not mean being passive. We can, and should, change norms and enact rules to amplify the beauty of creative companionship and minimize the drag of endless meetings and make the whole process of activism more lovable.