The Quiet Water

Psalm 132:1

When Frank first took up fly fishing, his pleasure was drowned by the noise of his ambition to be perfect. His first casts puddled at his feet like tangled yarn. He spent more time cursing the maple trees that caught his back-cast than he did watching the water. Every outing was a battle—an exercise in humiliation where the lack of a fish felt like a personal failure.

In those days, Frank was an “excessively needy” angler; he was there only for what the river could give him, and he screamed internally when it gave him nothing.

Slowly, the seasons smoothed his edges. There was less cursing and fewer flies left in the branches. The guidance of an old friend finally took root: “It’s called fishing, not catching, for a reason.”

One beautiful afternoon, Frank stood in the current, reminiscing. He could objectively see the man he used to be—impatient, demanding, whining like a child for the immediate gratification of a tight line. He had been focusing on the wrong things by trying to master the river rather than join it.

With a knowing grin, Frank let out a slow breath and cast. The line unrolled in a near-perfect loop, reaching sixty feet across the water to the far bank. The nymph landed softly, four feet upstream of the target drift. It was a cast of quiet competence.

He watched the indicator slide through the riffle, his mind no longer racing with “what ifs,” but settled into the rhythm of the flow.

Three times he drifted. Three times the water held its secrets. In his youth, this silence from the fish would have been an insult. Today, it was more like a conversation.

After the fourth drift, Frank began stripping in his line to move downstream. Just as the fly left the surface, a magnificent rainbow trout exploded from the water exactly where his fly had been moments before. Its vibrant colors, shiny metallic silver side, and iridescent pink stripe glistened against the sunlight as it arched into the air.

In his earlier days, Frank would have scrambled. His heart would have hammered with a frantic, desperate energy to get another fly into that circle of ripples. He would have chased the fish with a mind that was noisy with his eagerness to be victorious.

But today, Frank simply stood still.

He watched the ripples dissipate, feeling the cool pressure of the current against his waders. He didn’t feel the sting of a missed opportunity or the self-criticism of a late strike. Instead, he felt a profound peace. He had calmed and quieted himself; the thrill of the catch was no longer necessary for the joy of the day. He simply stood in the presence of the river, content to be a witness to its beauty.

Frank knew there would be other trout, other dances. But as he looked at the empty water, he realized that for the first time in his life, the silence was enough.