The Fisherman's Fender and the Forgotten Habit of Waiting to Arrive

I met him on a grey wharf slick with the morning’s drizzle. Elias was not a young man, but his movements had a fluid economy that made age irrelevant. He was preparing his small, work-worn boat for a day on the water, but he wasn’t in a hurry. What caught my eye, and held it, was his ritual with the fenders—those simple, often grubby buoys of rubber or plastic that hang from a vessel’s side to protect it from the dock.

He didn’t just toss them over. For each one, he paused. He checked the line for fraying, ran it through his fingers, and then lowered the fender slowly, hand over hand, until it hung just so. He’d give it a slight push, watching it swing. Only when it settled against the dock pilings with a soft, confirming thud did he move to the next. It wasn’t a task to be completed; it was a process to be inhabited. He was, I realized, waiting to arrive.

We spend our working lives in a frantic scramble to get to the desk, to open the application, to launch the project. We treat the transition into deep work like a sprint from a starting pistol. But Elias offered a different blueprint. His true work began not when the engine turned over, but in these quiet, deliberate moments of preparation. The fenders were his final anchor to the land-bound world. Tending to them with care was an act of mental sparring, a way to shed the rush and clutter of the shore. By the time he cast off the last line, his mind was already on the water, attuned to its rhythms, ready for the patient, attentive work of a fisherman.

The Productive Slip of a Mooring Line

I’ve tried to import this into my own work. I call it ‘rigging the fenders.’ It’s the ten minutes I now take before I dare to touch the main task. It’s not planning, not in the bullet-point sense. It’s a quiet sequence of physical and mental adjustments. Wiping the desk clear. Filling the water glass. Opening a single, specific file and then just looking at it, without the pressure to write or change a thing. It’s the friction of a mundane action that signals to the deeper parts of the brain: we are preparing for departure.

This is the antithesis of multi-tasking. It is a mono-ritual. In a world that champions the ‘five-second rule’ to jolt ourselves into action, the fisherman’s method feels almost heretical. Its productivity lies not in speed, but in sureness. Elias wasn’t avoiding work; he was ensuring the work that followed would be effective, that his focus wouldn’t be dashed against the distractions he was leaving behind. He understood that a clean transition saves more time than a hasty one.

I left the wharf thinking not about fishing, but about arrival. We are so focused on being productive that we forget the value of arriving properly at the place where productivity happens. The fender, a humble buffer, teaches that the space between intention and action isn’t a void to be leaped over. It is, instead, the most critical ground to be walked with purpose. It is where the real work quietly begins, before a single word is written or a single line of code is run.

Notes & further reading

A few pages I came back to while writing this: