Why is catching a fish so thrilling? I think about this a lot — usually in those non-thrilling moments when I am not catching any fish. I’ve come to the conclusion that fishing is like gambling: you never quite know when you are going to get a bite. You fish and fish and fish and nothing, and then wham: you get a bite and the adrenaline starts pumping. It’s like hitting the jackpot. But fishing isn’t so much like slot machine gambling, where some mechanical ratchet or digital algorithm determines your payout (although the bad odds are similar), rather fishing is more like poker where skill and practice increase your luck. Yet while fishing can be thrilling at times, at other times, most of the time, it can be excruciatingly boring. The same repetitive motions, staring across the water, not knowing if there’s anything under that opaque surface that might be remotely interested in what you are offering. But it is exactly the long stretches of boredom — the runs of bad luck — that make the moment when a fish hits your lure, your rod doubles, and your reel drag screams as the hooked fish makes its run, so damn thrilling.
“Whose streets? Our Streets!” I absolutely loathe the unoriginality of this common protest chant, but it taps the rush you get when you are in the middle of what would normally be a car-jammed boulevard and everywhere you look you see people protesting for the same cause. It’s those moments when you can viscerally feel the potential power of the people. Yes, activism is thrilling, and for some folks, that’s all it is. These activists get addicted to the thrill and spend their time hopping from one hotspot to another, this protest to that protest, in search of a high. Then there are the activists who continually raise the stakes in search of thrills, staging more and more confrontational tactics in order to provoke more extreme responses from authorities and boost media notoriety. Most common, however, are those activists who quit activism when the thrill is gone. What all these folks don’t seem to realize, or recognize, is that it’s the long stretches of patient planning and organizing — the boring meetings, the tedious communications, the uncomfortable fundraising — which allow for the thrilling moments of activism.