To inform your view of the world, you need to cast a net.
But...
you could choose to cast a hook.
A hook, of course, could merely target the one thing that you think you most want.
It might be an idea, perhaps one that already supports your current position regardless of whether it's right or wrong, complete or incomplete.
It might be a person.
It might be a protocol.
But the operation will be clean. Neater. More closed.
Less noisy.
Casting a net into the silt will pick up mud and twigs and unpolished stones.
They will need to be filtered and panned and cleaned.
Tapping the side of the net may dump a good deal of the mud. But still, sigh...as there is a lot more work that will need to be done.
Eventually, one thing in your net will jump out at you, appear to have a shine or character of its own.
You could polish it, share it, perhaps even hang it on your hook.
Your new item of knowledge or commitment or relationship will have back story. It will have value, merit. It will have been hard-earned, rather than presented to you in it's cellophane.
That's not to say that casting a hook may not be a long challenging journey in its own way.
But it will be so much less full. There will be so much investment in that target that, should it fail to match your hopes, it will be more difficult to swap out.
Still completing that great game you were going to code for the ZX Spectrum?
Still finishing that novel?
Perhaps your target is fuller assimilation and indoctrination in a belief system.
Well, it is a brave man who can spend years looking for such a thing, manipulating other steadier ideas to fit it in, allow it and support it, and then, ultimately, admit to himself that he has succumbed to affectation and untruth. Been Hoodwinked.
As somebody famous [ok ,it was Mr Spock in Amok Time] once said, "After a while you may find that 'having' is not nearly so pleasing a thing as wanting".
The prospect of repeating such a journey may be too much to bear.
Hook-Man could change into Net-Man.
But by now, with the years intervening, the idea of starting with a net may be too hopelessly distant, confusing or degrading. He may decide he is too tired to start such a journey, too depressed even to consider it, and generally unable to imagine an end.
And all the while, the trawlers will be casting their nets shaking off the mud, picking, filtering, deciding, polishing, presenting and eventually exchanging, discarding, upgrading and iterating.
Muddy Nets.
Or shiny sharp hooks.
The decision.
Is yours.
