The Fisherman's Empty Net

There was a fisherman on a small stretch of coast who, one particular morning, caught nothing. This was not, in the grand scheme of a fishing life, unusual — the sea keeps its own accounts and pays out when it feels like it — but this particular morning had been preceded by two other mornings much like it, and a week much like those, and a month, if he was honest with himself, that had been trending in a direction he did not care to look at squarely.

He sat on the wall of the harbour with his empty net across his knees and considered, for the first time in twenty years of fishing, whether he had chosen the wrong life. The other boats were coming in. Some had fish. Some had not. The ones that had fish did not look especially happy about it; they looked, mostly, tired. The ones that had no fish looked much the same. From a distance you could not, in fact, tell them apart.

A boy came along the wall selling apples. The fisherman bought one because he had nothing else to do with his hands. The boy, who was perhaps ten, looked at the empty net and said, without any cruelty, 'No luck today?' The fisherman shook his head. The boy sat down beside him, uninvited, and began polishing his own apple on his sleeve. 'My grandfather used to fish,' he said. 'He said the sea gives you three things and only one of them is fish.'

The fisherman, out of politeness rather than curiosity, asked what the other two were. The boy thought about it with the seriousness only a ten-year-old can bring to a question. 'The morning,' he said, 'and the quiet.' Then he stood up, wished the fisherman a good day, and went to sell his apples elsewhere.

The fisherman sat for a long time after the boy had gone. The tide, which had been high, began to withdraw. Gulls settled on the empty net without fear of him. The sun, which had been struggling with a bank of cloud, won its argument and put a clean gold line along the wet stones of the harbour. He had had, he realised, both of the other two things all morning, and had spent the whole time counting only the missing third.

He went home that day with no fish and a strange lightness he could not immediately explain. He came back the next morning, and the next, and the sea, for whatever reason of its own, gave him fish for the rest of the week. It made no difference to the lightness, which had, by then, settled in and taken a chair.

The lesson is not that fish do not matter. Fish pay for boats and boots and bread. The lesson is that whatever you have gone out to catch, the world has quietly slipped two other things into your net first, and if you spend the whole morning shouting at the empty middle you will walk home poorer than a man who caught nothing at all.