SLACK
For legit fishermen, casting is like breathing. Those who are serious about the sport toss their lines draped with bait across the air and into the water hundreds of times throughout a day on the lake. And they do so with uncanny precision. They can whip a line armed with a jig into the crevice of a tight crook of the lake while operating the trolling motor with one foot and never giving a thought about their thumb on the spool of line. The not-thought-about thumb has a critical job, though. Without it working its magic, the cast will turn out in a mess.
A fisherman’s thumb acts as the governor of the central nervous system of the casting-catching scheme. The thumb determines how much line is graciously given up for bait positioning, allowing just enough room for wrangling out of trouble but not too much to lose control. The pressure of the thumb on the line, along with the drag set, then controls the amount of run available to the swimming fish, offering him the optimal amount of buy-in time for committing to the bait. The thumb is the provider of room to adjust and amend on the cast, then the drag takes over from there. Together the two are providers of slack.
And slack is essential for fishing. Without it, you don’t have a shot at getting a fish in the boat.
I grew up pond fishing alongside my dad in southern Oklahoma with a Zebco push-button reel and a minnow and bobber rig. The Zebco 33 was foolproof. Unlike his open face bait-caster where the line balled-up under my thumb like a bird’s nest in a Charlie Brown-like concoction that would take hours for us to undo, all I had to do to cast the closed-face Zebco was press a button and let it fly. Once the minnow and bobber plunked in the water, I’d turn the handle of the reel one click, and Wah Lah! The slack was managed for me. On every cast I had at least a chance of reeling in a fish.
Slack provides room to maneuver. It is integral to the art.
Generally speaking, though, slack gets a bad rap. In life it can look a lot like lazy. In pre-meditated doses, however, it is actually anything but. Slack is, practically speaking, more industrious than it is slothful. It functions as a shock absorber—a cushioned space that gives us access to things that need immediate attention. A grace cloud that enables us to try things to see what might and might not work. A soft cocoon that authorizes us to improvise and re-imagine and strategically affect change. Slack provides the wiggle room we often need to respond in the most effective ways.
When my brother and I were imprisoned to the back seat on long car rides when we were little, we would sit cross-legged and race against each other, maniacally, with our thumbs on these little plastic square numbered tiles that would slide around inside a metal frame. I don’t know what the manufacturer called the hand-held puzzle—we just called it the slide game. The objective was to put the numbers in chronological order, and the only way to physically move them was by having a blank space inside the frame that didn’t house a plastic square.
The space provided options. Breathing room. Somewhere to go with things while other things were getting rearranged.
Our thumbs would push and pull numbers up and down and right and left via the gift of the unoccupied quadrant until they all lined up in order from least to greatest. The puzzle was considered finished when it all worked chronologically regardless of where the space ended up. The space wasn’t part of the finished product, it was what gave the product a chance to get finished. Without the square of nothing, nothing good got done.
It's impossible to know exactly what is going to be needed—in a given day, on a respective project, in the broad stroke of a life—but almost everything gets along a little bit better with a built-in bullpen, a place to get a good look at things before action is required.
In his book Slack, Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, Tom Demarco refers to slack as the “lubricant of change.” Without it, he says, we live and work rigid, with little room to attend to the unpredicted, and little ability to bend a course in a slightly better way. Insufficient slack causes more problems than too much could ever create, he says. We need it for the freedom. It allows us the opportunity to do and be our best.
Unfortunately, slack’s reputation problem often creates a conundrum. We can’t quite come to terms with scheduled “nothing time.” It seems dangerous and risky, a threat to efficiency, the antithesis of productivity rather than the gateway to getting things done. But that’s just if we judge it on appearance. What it does— not what it looks like— is where its value lies.
Fishermen get that in the fullest sense. They call wiggle room their ace.