I arranged my stance just below the green, about 5 yards away. Hovering over the sightline, I visualized the ball gliding onto the green and checking up, rolling with purpose to within a couple feet of the pin. My feet shifted, moving the ball toward my back foot so that my hands led the club, which I held gently as I leaned forward onto my left leg and slightly fanned out my front foot. I looked up once more toward my target, then back to the ball, then back to the target again, and if you saw me you'd think I was an old pro or a little nervous or completely mad. But I was focused.
The ball jumped off the clubface as if repelled by the club's descent, as if desperate to escape its fate as it saw the metal blade thrashing through the jungle of grass. In fact, I don't remember a sensation of actually making contact with the ball at all. It fled from my position and raced out on its own. It came out quickly, steeply -- and I think it bounced three times on the green -- the first bounce actually made a substantial mark on the green's surface -- building up a tight topspin on the way to racing past the pin and bounding over the green into the rough on the other side, where it was held up suddenly by the tangled weeds. I felt my face contort and I started to retrace my efforts to identify -- in a futile effort -- exactly what went wrong.
Standing there observing my fate, my shoes still buried in the short dense grass, I decided that golf is a metaphor for life. But then again, so is writing and so is the stock market and battlefields and love. So it's a stupid idea, really.
"I think I have trouble visualizing," I would say to my partner as we walked toward the next tee. That is, I would say that, were it not that I tend to play alone. I don't like waiting for others to hit. Maybe if I had a caddie, one of those wise Zen caddies that could translate the game into lessons about the nature of man --- and read greens. He could do that too, because I stink at that.
"Visualizing? How so?" he would say to me.
"Well, I visualize how I want the ball to go and I concentrate hard on that result. I see myself in the correct position, with the right grip, weight distributed properly, and I picture a smooth swing connecting with the ball and sending it exactly to the point where I want it. But it never really happens that way. It's always something entirely unexpected and strange to me. I see what really happens and I think, How the hell did I do that?"
"Sounds like your visualizing is fine. It's your execution that needs work."
"Very funny. I mean, that's easy to say. But how can you know you're practicing and preparing yourself the right way? Do universal principles exist? You never really know and then you get out there on the course and have bad habits that you never planned for ..."
"Well, you have to believe in your own intuition to a certain extent. It's not a pure science. Golf is a metaphor for life, you know."
Yeah, right I thought to myself as my caddie would accelerate his stride and grin in that way so I could only see it from the side as he walked on, concealing his secrets from me the way wise men do.
On the next tee box I am enacting a grand ritual intended to improve my chances of keeping the ball inbounds. Par 3. Elevated tee box. Hard to judge the distance, but of course my caddie knows it down to the yard.
"147 yards," he announces from behind me, staring at the pin and then lifting his head to observe the wind. "Yep. 147."
This, of course, means nothing to me. I understand it would be important information for someone who knew how to hit 147 yards, but for me it's worthless. I've hit wedges 150 yards and 5-irons 80 yards before, so knowing the exact distance is no guarantee on anything.
But I nod confidently and even look toward the green like I agree completely. (But again, if he told me it was 220 I would still nod and agree the same). I have selected an iron that once approximated this distance, and I'm standing behind the ball pretending to align myself with the eventual path of the perfect tee shot. I am soon addressing the ball, cycling through a complex checklist of mental and physical preparation, of swing keys and images and in one brief moment of meditative grace, imagining myself as a supernatural composition of perfectly controlled aggression.
I am in the swing. From the coiled apex, I hammer down toward the devilish white dimples, and there is desperation in my attack, like a faceless hero swinging his battle axe to slay the dreadful Hydra. The ball comes off with a heavy thud and launches out into space while I struggle a bit with my balance, only to awkwardly correct my finishing stance and search for the ball out in the distance.
When you watch auto racing on TV, it's difficult to sense the true speed of the cars when they're in the straight-away. As long as they're not moving against any relative objects or forces, they seem to be shuttling along in a vacuum. It's not until they reach the curves that you realize the accumulating heat of motion, the hurtling and vibrating steel challenging inertia to direct the vehicle along the tight, tenuous edge of the turn. There is power and conflict in it. The spectacle of the high-speed curve is impressive to the extent that it represents an unnatural phenomenon.
In fact, it is that exact term, 'unnatural phenomenon,' that enters my thoughts first when I see my tee shot start to transform itself in the distance. Everything is fine -- better than fine -- as I watch the ball penetrate the broad airspace of the green... until it slams into a curve. As if on a rail, like a pinball shooting through the bend before it releases into the chaos of flashing bumpers, my golf ball starts to burn and spin and sharply alter its course to the right. It seems to speed up and get a burst of power as it thrusts against the straight line and completely loses any sense of direction. At this point its mayhem turns abortive, and the ball smashes like a burning helicopter into the dark, forebidding treeline.
After a protracted but listless search and some creative adjudication of the rules of golf, eventually I'm on the green again. The ball is at rest, challenging me to devise its path to the hole over the subtle turns and invisible hills separating it from its target. I'm not actively conscious of how I got here, but I can retrace my strokes and the events that brought me to this point, looking back selectively and deleting the most painful moments and finally stringing together an acceptable chain of experiences that produced the present. It is not an accurate history, but real enough nonetheless.
Following another series of rituals, I two-putt. It seems to me there is nothing more defeating or miserable (not in terms of score, but in regards to my resultant emotional state) as the two-putt. There is neither agony nor triumph in the two-putt. It is an unelectrified state. At least with a three-putt or worse, there is finality of judgment. You have delivered a decidedly unsatisfactory performance and your task now is to abandon what you're doing and learn, grow, develop, practice. A trial of endurance awaits you, but the verdict is charged with hope and practicality and vitality. Alternately, the one-putt (or better yet, the sublime up-and-down) is reason alone for celebration, for raw animal elation. You have conquered nature and its chaotic challenges and have overcome the adversity of your journey at its ultimate step. Cry out, pump your fist. You are the victorious warrior.
But no, I would enjoy neither of these supercharged emotional states. I am stuck with a two-putt, menacing me with its banal suggestion, offering me no clear path.
"Good job," my caddie would say, and 'good' is a muted damnation, soiled with the spirit of mediocrity and failure, and the experience is at once cast off into the blackness of forgotten time. I shrug my shoulders, replace my putter unceremoniously, and move toward the next tee without a word.
We are sitting (my caddie and I) on a bench in the luscious shade just short of the next tee. A threesome is teeing off and we're waiting for them to get far out ahead of us. We are always following others, I think, but we just don't realize it until our own progress is impeded, until we are there in relation to them, whether at odds with their path or not.
My caddie turns to me and I sense he has been measuring his words carefully. "So you're unhappy with your game."
No question mark there. It is a natural fact. "Uh, yes. You could say that."
"Ok, ok. So things aren't working the way they're supposed to. It could be that way because of a variety of reasons or factors, some of them inter-related. It's hard to build backwards toward the truth when all those factors get mixed up into reality."
"Is this going somewhere?"
"Just stay with me. What I suggest is that all those external factors you're obsessed with can't get properly arranged without first containing them in the right frame of mind. That is, if you want to succeed, you'll have to revolutionize your way of thinking."
I'm stuck on the word 'revolutionize.' It seems like an intrusion on an idea I might have otherwise followed. It's strange. I stare suspiciously at my caddie. Is this companion still the same captive of my imagination or has he started to exist outside of me, taking on an alien voice?
"I can tell by the silence that you're stuck on that word, 'revolutionize.' That's too bad. But you have to get over it. Really, to 'revolutionize' only means bringing about a radical change. That doesn't say the change is necessarily new or entirely unique, just different -- radically different. It's the process of change for its own sake. No creativity is required. Just will."
Just will, I think to myself and repeat out loud as I move away from the bench toward the vacated tee box.
"Just will, huh?"
"You're trivializing the idea," he would call out, still reclining in the shade. "I didn't say it would be easy."
The ball is teed up. I turn away from it and take a few swings, feeling the muscles dissolve and loosen.
I'm not trivializing or dismissing the idea at all. On the contrary, I think it has merit. Change. Just will. It relieves some pressure and still requires very little of me. I like it."
Reaching my position now, my caddie nods his head slowly, thoughtfully. "Change forces action. Change is the enemy of mediocrity."
"Excellent. You're really warming up to this Zen caddie role."
"I try. But you are a miscreant student of my wisdom."
Turning around, I take one quick look down the fairway and then set up at the ball. I am the archer, enchanted with stillness, with 'purposeless tension.' I lower my head and cast back, then immediately sweep down in a perfect rhythm of force. No thinking, no doubt or fear or any emotion. No conscious effort. I am nothingness. In a betrayal of space & time, I achieve a contact with the ball so genuine that I can only experience it at some infinite depth inside me. I feel overwhelmed, like a child having a first experience of intense, selfless joy.
Towering. As I stand there maintaining my finish for far too long, I decide that 'towering' would be an accurate way to describe that drive. Tall, far -- really far -- galloping down the middle of the fairway and treading effortlessly over the rolling contours past the sand traps and tiny valleys that threaten the tee shots of mortals. Even from far away, I can see the ball lying in an ideal position, hoisted gently on outstretched blades of grass.
"Brilliant. That was about as perfect as you get. What did you do differently that time?"
"I have no idea," I say, relaxing finally and unwinding from my pose. "I honestly have no idea at all. It just happened."
"Well, surely you sense that something was different ..."
"Yes, I sense it, for sure. But I cannot describe it to you. That's the dilemma already, the paradox.It was exhilarating. I want to have that feeling every second of the day. Man, really, everything is different now."
And it was. In an instant that somehow involved me (and to a certain degree did not), I am liberated from regret and futility. But it is an ecstasy in constant motion, fleeing from me the moment I feel most connected to it, like two arcs meeting at an exact tangent and then diverging -- but remaining close, the distance measured by the intensity of memory.
I started down from the tee, and it would not be hyperbole to say that I felt supremely triumphant as we marched down the wide alley of fairway bending slightly toward our destination like an ancient procession street. Maybe it is different, I thought. Maybe I really did figure it out. It was just will and change and everything else falls into place in some ineffable harmony. Maybe I am, in fact, controlling events.
This thought sticks with me and charges me with its suggestion.
"Do you really think golf is a metaphor for life?" I ask.
My caddie shook his head and laughed a little. "No, I don't think so. It's just a game, my friend. I think you make too much of it sometimes."
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