Fishing for Fun

A wise man today shared with me the folktale that my life has been missing. For six months now I have been trying to find the best and most accurate way to explain why I chose to come to Spain, why it was the right move for me to quit a dream job (someone’s dream, not, I discovered, mine) and move across the world for a job that paid much less in a field I wasn’t interested in pursing.

“I love Spain,” didn’t seem to be explanation enough. “I want to learn Spanish,” didn’t quite cut it on the justification front. A long-winded lecture about “living life” and “living my age” and “learning about the world” always sounded a tad too idealistic to be fully believable. Luckily my friends and family didn’t need an explanation; they supported my wanderlust and encouraged me to follow my heart. Now I finally have the perfect story to illustrate to them why I’m bucking the traditional plan (school-university-job-husband-kids-retirement) and frolicking around a tiny pueblo in a rural corner of Spain.

This story is about a gray-haired fisherman living in a small wooden house by the sea.

Every morning the fisherman wakes up, walks down the beach to his tiny wooden boat and kicks off into the ocean. For two hours he casts his line to catch just enough fish for his family to eat that day and a couple extra to sell for a few euros. One day the aging fisherman encounters a man wearing a suit on the beach. He is a middle-manager at a large business, on a weekend-long beach vacation. Upon meeting the fisherman, the suit-wearing businessman tells him, “I’ve been watching you now for two days and I have a great plan for improving your  life…

“Instead of working just two hours every day you should start working eight hours. That way you can catch four times as many fish and sell them to the market for four times the profit!

Fisherman casts into the Golden Horn from Galata Bridge in Istanbul.

“Then instead of this little rickety boat you can buy a proper fishing boat and hire a few men to help you run it and more than double your profit…

“With all that money you can buy a bigger, more modern house in the city…

“As your profits grow you can invest them in a whole fleet of fishing boats and your profits will grow exponentially…

Boating on the Bosphorus

“Then, with a healthy sum in the bank, you can retire and buy a vacation home by the ocean and a small fishing boat. Then you can spend your days fishing for fun!”

The gray-haired man stepped out of his small wooden boat and put his hand on the businessman shoulder. “Sir,” he said, “I already do.”

Why would I spend my youth at a desk, working to save money so that in forty years I can retire and begin to do the things that make me happy? I’m going to skip the forty years of sacrificing my happiness fish for fun NOW I’m going to figure out a way to make my happiness into my living. That’s why I moved to Spain. Because I couldn’t waste another moment living to work.