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This Sunday there was a segment on 60 Minutes about mindfulness (meditation) and they talked about being in the moment. It caused me to think about how often I really am in the moment and not thinking about what has happened in the past or what is going to happen in the future. Then it dawned on me that when I am the most "in the moment" these days is when I am out in the kayak fishing. I fish by myself most of the time so there is no distraction of conversation or trying to figure out why the other guy is catching more fish than me. Most of the time I am out there on the water in the kayak I am just experiencing what is going on. Enjoying the sunrise, observing what it happening in the water around me, making a cast and a retrieve. If I am lucky enough to hook a fish I am totally absorbed in the experience, sensing everything that is going on. I think that this may be why I enjoy it out there so very much. It may be the therapy that I need.

To take this thought a little further, I think that this being in the moment thing is something that I have always sought out in my sporting activities. To be quite honest I have never been much of team sports kind of guy. The sports I have enjoyed the most were often very solitary endeavors. When I was younger I used to do a great deal of snow skiing. While there definitely was a social part of that sport, when I was actually on a downhill run all that was in my mind was what I was doing and experiencing at that moment. I also used to do a great deal of windsurfing and Hobie catamaran sailing. Again, each of these sports offered me the opportunity to get totally lost in the moment of what I was doing. In fact if you did not wipe everything else out of your mind you really could not do very well at any of these thing.

If you are interested in seeing the 60 Minutes segment here is a link: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mindfulness ... 0-minutes/

Well said Steve. Some of the most impactful times of my life have been in nature, alone. I remember Elk hunting in the Flat Top Wilderness area of Colorado. It was a pack-in, horseback hunt. I remember setting out on horseback before daylight following a river when the sun burst from between two mountain peeks. It was astonishing and I felt alive. The same has been true watching dolphin herding mullet into each other as the sun begins to lay down on the bay while I'm fishing alone in my plastic boat. John Muir said along time ago "Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit clean." I agree with old John, we need to "break away" once in a while.

To me, fishing has never been a sport or a hobby or a game or an occasion for some social event. It is a craft, and what you're talking about is simply another tool that an advanced craftsman can use to ascend to a still higher level of craftsmanship. They asked Michelangelo how he could envision such beautiful statues; "I don't," he replied. "The statue is already in the block of stone. I just study the block for a long time and figure out what needs to get chipped off."

Granted, "mindfulness" makes it sound like something one is actively and deliberately doing, when in fact the only "action" one is "taking" is fundamentally passive -- allowing oneself to be totally open to the world. What one is essentially doing is removing all the "filters" (i.e., that gigantic, soul-tiring bag of sensory bricks -- habits, expectations, presuppositions, agendas, biases, opinions, conditioning, yearnings, guilt, dickfear, titlust, yada-yada-yada) that most of us lug around our whole lives. And when you can finally, even for the briefest of moments, just drop that burden... well, in some cultures, they refer to it as "parting the veil" or "finding the center".

(Being old, mean, ugly, crippled, well-scarred and sarcastic, I personally prefer the "dropping a load" analogy.) ^o^

This is, of course, why some small fraction of your fishing peers may now -- no doubt privately -- assure themselves that you're going to start sprouting flowers in your beard and leading a drum circle at the Zebco factory. But a cursory search of the available literature has convinced me that, these shortsighted naysayers be damned, the truly enlightened minds of history agree with you:

Baba Ram Dass: "Be here now." Anthony de Mello: "Thought can organize the world so well that you are no longer able to see it." Stewart Brand: "We can't put it together, man, it is together." Hunter S. Thompson: "It was like falling down an elevator shaft and landing in a pool full of mermaids." Bruce Lee: "Empty your cup so that it may be filled; become devoid to gain totality." Winston Churchill: "I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you." Jimmy Buffett: "It was like the jitterbug: so simple that it plumb evaded me." H2Oz: "'No-WOO!' is the official sponsor of STFU and FISH!"

Peace out,

Swami Bognavishnu H2Ozzzzzzz

TL/DR: Spot friggin' on, bro.

Interesting that you call it a craft. Not a word I would use, but we may be saying the same thing. I view an important element of my fishing, skiing..ect. as problem solving. What do I need to do to make this go better. Probably my best example of this was my catamaran sailing. On a light boat with large sales every little adjustment of the sheets or your positioning on the boat yields a reaction. The puzzle that needs to be solved is to find the right combination in the given conditions to make the boat perform the best. The concentration that it takes to do that drives all other thoughts out of your mind.

All well said gents......and I get it....but for me I'll take a good old football game or a 6-4-3 double play, or a 4 man skins game of golf or a good old poker game.....I like the competition...... I ONCE fought a gorilla(It was really a mid size monkey) in a cage at a county fair in Pa for a $100 bet man that didnt go well I didnt last the required 1 min....lol....As for fishing I fish or at least used to fish alone a lot not because I liked it but because nobody wanted to fish with me To quote Jr Soprano "I Yap worse than 6 barbers"...... ha ha ha....Just my 2 cents....

@ Manning: Your analogy regarding "tuning the boat" is quite good. Fine-tuning the process, not the object, is the mark of a craftsman (and a true waterman).

As my grandfather used to say, "It ain't the tool, it's the user, bub. Ask any grown woman." Grandma seemed to be smiling pretty often, too. ^o^

Yes very calming, until that is I get one of those dad-gum wind knots in my braid, then my blood pressure starts to rise....