I read a book which had as its premise that the game of golf was much more than a game, that it was a metaphor for life…that when played with the proper mindset, all of life’s lessons and challenges could be found, practiced and mastered on the links. I read the entire book, which was neither long nor difficult, because a friend had enthusiastically recommended it. He said that its perspectives had a huge impact on his life in a Jonathan Livingston Seagull kind of way. His reference to this ancient text published in 1970 caught my attention. I was curious as to what he had found so personally helpful and profound.
Just so you know, Richard Bach’s book in 1970 was as popular in its day as was the book published in 2007 entitled The Shack written by William P. Young. Both books ignited lively conversations in unexpected places. The conversations have since died down. The spark was there but the wood was too wet to catch the fire.
Anyway, the book on golfing did not move me. While its life lesson concepts were familiar, their applications to golf, for me, were a real stretch. I’ve yet to meet a golfer who had more of an interest in improving themselves as a person than they had in improving their score. I don’t make this statement hypothetically.
I actually went out and played golf with friends, acquaintances and strangers with the golf book in my back pocket. I played twice a week for three months at public and private courses. I would pull out the book and ask people if they had read or heard about it. No one had. Not discouraged and because they were golfers, I would give my listener(s) a brief synopsis with the belief that it would start a conversation and invite some interest. It did not. In my attempts to engage and generate more substantive dialogue, I went so far as to talk about and connect specific shot situations with the learning opportunities the book stated would apply.
The glances between the other golfers and the looks I received directly were crystal clear. I was speaking a foreign language, one that they had no interest in learning and that I was far from being inviting. I was annoying.
That was my own breakthrough realization. The lessons about life, the truths about ourselves, can be found anywhere and applied everywhere. We do, however, have to want them. We do have to be willing to seek them, to be open to them and to ACT on them once we have recognized them. Our lessons do not jump out and force us to learn. They wait for us to notice them, to bend towards them and to pick them up for us to use again along our way.
Oh, and about my friend who first mentioned the book that got this all started.
What I discovered/realized was that my friend played golf frequently and had grabbed onto a book that provided him with some deeper underpinnings for wearing silly clothes and taking six hour chunks of a day, four to five times a week, away from everything else.
He’d learned that about himself after years of failing to improve his game.
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