Fishing: Great Escape for Great Outdoors Month

There is no greater outdoor activity to share with the natural world around you than fishing. Also, there is no greater time of year to attach the old lures to the crazy looking hat, reorganize the tackle box, assemble a litany of consumables and pack them into the cooler, recharge the battery and push off into your favorite fishing waters.

Why is fishing the ultimate outdoors escape? There are multiple reasons and each could subsist on its own as a motivating factor to participate.

Depending on your preferences, fishing is an outdoor activity that can take place with any number of like-minded collaborators. There is great psychological benefit to the fishing expedition accompanied by no more than some beverages and snacks, maybe a sandwich, a light breeze, an advancing sunset or breathtaking sunrise, an open horizon-to-horizon perspective, some idea of the prey you're chasing, and the quiet we sometimes so desperately need. Similarly, it's perhaps the best environment to share with friends. It provides the opportunity you don't often have - the time to share uncluttered conversations that penetrate the surface.

For the same reason, it might be the most productive, uplifting, and rewarding experience you ever share with a child, if they can endure the sometimes lengthy periods between catches. Great, lengthy conversations can be fostered. An appreciation of the great outdoors and its meandering, unstructured weaving through the day can be acquired and shared. A lasting relationship and indelible memories can be established.

The great pursuit is reason enough to hop in the boat and motor to the location only you and a handful of others (you think) have found to be productive areas to catch the ultimate prize...say, the five-foot plus fresh water large mouth bass, for example. There, resting atop the surface, you plunge a scientifically-selected lure into the vast openness and await the response. Sometimes, it comes in the form of a barely perceptible nibble that conjures an image of an aquatic dance away from your view as the fish decides on its course of action. Other times, an overt, aggressive response shakes you from your reverie as you are forced to consider instant strategies that will result in a cell phone photo of you and a finned creature in close proximity.

At still other times, in fact the majority of times, you sit quietly, pole in hand, line in water, and are left to consider the ultimate beauty of that which you too often pass hurriedly during an obstructively hectic life. There, for more than a few moments, the natural way of things has an opportunity to envelop you, embrace you, and tell you in its delightfully abstract way, "Everything's going to be okay."