Here is Bruno de Querfort (974-1009), reporting St Romuald of Camaldoli's advice on meditation. (I found the quotation in Mary Carruthers' book, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images 400-1200).
Be seated within your cell as though in paradise; cast to the rear of your memory everything distracting, becoming alert and focussed on your thoughts as a good fisherman is on the fish. One pathway [to this state] is through reciting the Psalms; do not neglect this. If you cannot manage to get through them all [at one sitting] as you used to with the fervor of a novice, take pains to chant the psalms in your spirit, now [starting] from this place, now from that, and to interpret them in your mind.
Carruthers focuses on the role of memory in contemplative work. Indeed, she refers to the view of the Church Father, John Cassian, that 'the art of meditation is fundamentally an art of thinking with a well-furnished memory'. So the image of the fishermen figures a particular state of recollection - a focus on what is below the surface of the mind waiting to be pulled up out of the water.
Cella of Saint Romuald in Camaldoli monastery. Image by Bocachete (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
I think this is is right - there is something about watching the float that empties the mind. When you start thinking of other things, you can't watch the float. Because the focus is on when the float starts to go under, that requires quite a lot of concentration. It is a tautology - you are doing nothing but everything and that is meditation.
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