The Water Does Not Ask Me Anything

Four days.

That is how long I have been a father again. I am not going to write much about him. His name is public and his birthday is public and as far as I am concerned that is the whole record. The rest is ours.

What I can write about is me. What I have noticed this week. What the quiet is doing to a man who spent a lot of years running from it.

Motion used to be my proof

There was a long stretch where I could not sit in a room by myself. Not would not. Could not.

I needed the phone going. I needed the truck running. I needed somebody on the other end of a call and a problem in front of me I could chew on. Motion felt like proof that I was alive and useful and not falling behind. If everything stopped, the inside of my head got loud, and I did not care much for what was in there.

I called it drive. It was not drive. It was avoidance with a good work ethic bolted to the front of it.

Saying the honest part

Men my age do not usually say the next part out loud, so I will say it plain and then move on.

Some of what I carry does not lie flat. It comes back at hours I did not schedule. It does not knock first. For years my entire plan was to outrun it, and the only way to outrun it is to never stop moving, and the only way to never stop moving is to keep the volume up.

That plan works right up until the day it does not.

Mine ran out. There was no clean moment where I fixed it. I would love to tell you there was. What there was instead was a long, unglamorous stretch of learning that the loud thing in your head gets quieter when you stop feeding it, and that stopping is a skill, and a skill has to be practiced somewhere.

I practice mine on the water.

What the water actually does

I am not being poetic about that. Here is the mechanical version.

You get up before the sun because the fish do not care about your calendar. You load the same gear in the same order, because doing things in order settles a man down. You drive out with nothing to prove to anybody. You push off, the noise of the world gets smaller behind you, and the only two things asking anything of you are the wind and the line.

The water does not ask me what happened. It does not ask me what I plan to do about it. It does not want a statement. It does not want my side of anything. It just sits there being older than my problems.

An hour of that does more for me than a year of arguing with strangers ever did.

Some mornings I catch something. Plenty of mornings I do not. That stopped being the point a while back. The point is that I can be still for three hours without needing one single thing to happen, and there was a version of me who could not do that for three minutes.

Four days in

A newborn teaches you the same lesson with less scenery.

Everything is small. Nothing on the list is impressive. You do the next honest thing and then the one after that, and the whole day gets built out of those, and at the end of it you cannot point to one item you would put on a resume. It is the least loud work there is.

I spent a lot of my life chasing the opposite. Big swings. Loud rooms. Being right where people could watch me be right. And here is something I would not have believed ten years ago: the loud version of me never once produced anything I am proud of today. Every single thing I am proud of got built quietly, over time, by a guy nobody was watching.

Endurance, not a sermon

I am not going to preach at you. I will just tell you what I hold onto.

Genesis 50:20. What was meant for harm, God meant for good. I do not read that as a promise that the harm was fake or that it did not cost anything, because it cost plenty. I read it as a promise that the account is not closed. That there is a use for the wreckage I cannot see from where I am standing right now.

Faith has never been a feeling for me. It is endurance. It is the reason I get up on the days when nothing in me wants to. It is the thing that finally let me stop needing the world to agree with me before I could be at peace.

Where I actually am

I am loud by myself now. That is the cleanest way I know to say it.

I still have plenty to say. I write it down. I put it where it belongs with my name on it, and then I go do something else. I do not sit there refreshing to see who agreed. I do not draft the reply. I do not need the room.

That is not resignation. That is the most expensive thing I own. It cost me nearly everything to buy and I am not trading it back for attention.

So the plan for this chapter is short. Build things that keep working when I am not in the room. Tell the truth in public and then walk away from it. Be at the house. Get on the water when I can. Raise kids who never have to wonder whether their dad is steady.

Four days in, that is the entire strategy.

What is the thing that lets your head go quiet, and when is the last time you actually did it?