Catch Your Dreams Before They Slip Away

My wife and I have one main goal in retirement: We want to be the people who pounce on the deal when the airline representative announces, “We’ll give you a flight tomorrow and a thousand-dollar flight credit if you give up your seat today.”

We’ve been offered that or substantially similar deals many times over the years and it has never made sense to take it. We travel a fair amount, but we both work full time jobs with limited time off, as well as side hustles that in many cases are at least as demanding as the supposedly main gigs. Many times we schedule things so that we arrive home from a trip at 1 am or 2 am and then get up at 6 to get to the office. There’s no time for lounging or delay.

That’s ok. We both have retirement timers on our phones and while we’ll likely never stop working, there will come a day when we have more freedom, more free time, and more flexibility. We will not start achieving our dreams at that time, but we will kick the process into overdrive.

As someone who came relatively late to “serious” fishing, things got hot in a hurry. I joined a bass club at 25, started fishing local derbies, and didn’t have many more aspirations in the field beyond that. But then I qualified as a co-angler for an FLW Championship, and while I never had any aspirations or illusions about going pro, I wanted to compete at an AA or AAA level and see most of the great bass fisheries in the United States.

I’ve been to a bunch of them and will continue to go to more, but that dream got derailed when my wife took me to El Salto for my 40^th birthday. Suddenly, I wanted to travel more over tournaments. Then we went to Brazil and Alaska and elsewhere and I realized that I had dreams beyond bass. It’s great to be laser-focused on something, but don’t do it to the exclusion of everything else. Now I want to go to the Maldives and the Seychelles and the extremes of Australia and La Zona in South America and hope to learn about 10 more places that I’ve never heard of that I just have to fish.

And what I’ve realized from all of this is that dreaming is a process, not a specific act. Otherwise, once you achieve it, you’re done. Furthermore, if your blinders keep you in a single narrow lane, you might not realize that an even better dream is a lane or two away. Many of my greatest fishing moments and happiest days have come about accidentally or through some sort of bizarre serendipity. Others have become because I “failed” or got sidetracked along the way. Twenty-eight-year-old me might initially be disappointed that my own tournament career never went anywhere at all, but I’d like to think that he’d be pretty damn surprised by all of the places I’ve gone and people I know.

Until then, I’m investing in lounge access at the airport, because I’m just a few years away from some valuable layovers.