I’m after a new hobby that has space and an outcome, so I found myself musing about fishing as a possibility. As an activist, a lover of river banks, piers, beaches and sea, it felt like a good fit. As someone who’s spent more hours wrestling with books than bait, there I was, speaking with a mate about the possibility of giving fishing a go. His response has lingered: “If I was to guess your next hobby, fishing would never have even made the list.” And I could see his point. Yet what really struck me was the gentle admiration he voiced, not so much for my angling nous, but for my optimism that I might catch more than the permitted two salmon per season.

Two salmon. It’s a paltry number, really. Yet, for me, my instinct and reflex, is to look for the glimmers of possibility where others might see scarcity. I wonder why is it I approach things like this, glass brimming with hope, an assumption of success even when the river is running thin?

Somewhere beneath this buoyant surface is the quiet undertow of whats gone before. The ripples of old stories, the clatter of childhood. I’m no stranger to the terrain of adversity, that stretch of years in my childhood where hardship edged the seasons, and the river of life often flowed murky. The textbooks label these sorts of things “adverse childhood experiences,” and the narratives attach warnings of gloom, fragility, risk. But that reality, that living, breathing, evolving gives me a wonderfully subversive logic.

I’ve come to see that within the chapters marked ‘difficulty’ there can be a strange kind of resource. Resilience as muscle memory for hope. When challenges came and physical flight was not an option, it taught me to scan the horizon not for loss, but for what might yet come into view. The fisherman’s prayer, “Maybe this cast,” echoes something deeper, a conviction that each attempt carries the possibility of a different outcome, even when the books and the bylaws would say otherwise.

It’s not always conscious, this tendency to override the limits and reach for the next best outcome. Sometimes it’s just stubborn curiosity, or an overinflated sense of self, often it’s a refusal to let the story be written in advance. Other times, it’s a conscious act of rebellion against the predisposition of pessimism. Where others see the posted sign, two salmon, part of me assumes success and wonders, “Yes, but what if?” There’s a joy in that question, a wild grace in believing the river may yield something more than it’s supposed to.

My friend’s remark that he admired my positivity was meant kindly, and I think it was recognition of something we don’t always name: hope isn’t just naivety, nor is it denial. Sometimes it’s born from the long, gradual work of braving the years where things were sparse and the nets came up empty. Fishing, then, becomes less about the catch than the casting, a test of faith, a hope for life to surface.

There’s an old saying on rivers: one fishes not for fish, but for restoration but for the me outcome, the catch remains important, so I’m not sure if it will make the new hobby list, but I do like the idea that it might be a way to keep practicing that muscle, stretching hope beyond the limits set by authorities and old stories. Because after all, two salmon is the rule. But possibility and hope like water, can never be wholly contained.