Wait for it...

when waiting is the thing

This is the story of an impossible journey, that happens every year anyway.

Sea-run fish are a bridge between two worlds, spending part of their life in fresh water, part at sea. Salmon are probably the best know of the sea-run fish. Born in the rivers, traveling the vast oceans as adults, each returning to the specific stream bed of its birth to spawn - and perish. Their journeys are the stuff of legend, the stuff of life and death, and always, relentlessly, down to timing, full of waiting.

You see, a sea-run fish doesn’t make its journey in a slow and steady marathon from start to finish. The edge of the world, where land meets sea, where rivers and oceans collide, is a tumbled tangle of opposing forces, currents constrained by geography, gravity dragging trailing surges across the crumpled topography of a revolving world.

Not far from my house, there is a tidal waterfall, a place where the river dives down a rocky cliff before completing its final stretch to the sea. At low tide, the basin beneath the waterfall drains and empties until only the deepest central channel of the river remains. You can walk far out into the riverbed and stare up at the towering falls. At high tide, the wide basin fills, and a much smaller cascade remains. It’s dramatic, and fascinating, this daily reversal, with a constancy and predictability that fades into the background of your consciousness until it feels mundane.

And this is where the Alewives run, a local sea-run fish that is a type of herring. The waterfall, of course, is a barrier to the Alewives. At low tide, it’s an insurmountable barrier, and the fish cram and pile and wriggle into the narrow channel and small pools like rush hour traffic, bumper-to-bumper, fin-to-fin, nose-to-tail. All waiting for a rising tide to broaden their horizons, present new opportunities, and open a path upstream.

Can you imagine? Most of these fish are doing this for the first time. They don’t have a history for comparison, a frame of reference to predict what might come next. This could, literally, be the end of their road. Perhaps there is no way out, no next leap. And anyway, the eagles are hungry, and next tide is guaranteed to no one. Waiting is its own activity. Waiting is the assignment. In this moment, waiting is all there is.

Human nature presses forward to see the results of our efforts, to see causes generate effects, one after another, activity being perceived as the necessary state for productivity, the necessary goal. It’s hard, in this paradigm, to reconcile waiting.

But nature is all about timing. Things in nature only happen in their own time, at the right time, determined by the flow of time. Nocturnal animals don’t hunt during the day. The sun doesn’t set at noon. The Alewives don’t run up the falls at low tide. It’s not the moment. The time has to be right. Right?

And that’s life sometimes, isn’t it? You’re in the pool. Everything that’s led up to this moment is behind you. Everything beyond this moment is impossible. There’s no path forward, and there’s no guarantee that there ever will be again.

But you have an advantage, because you do have a history and a frame of reference. You know that there is a path already laid out ahead. You know that the tide always rises, that it will rise again, and when it does, that path will be there ready for you. You know that if you wait, you just might see the impossible become possible - when the time is right.

We’ve all got lots of things to do. But sometimes, waiting is the thing.