Not a Post About How Golf Is Like Life. I'm Not That Cheesy.

This is worth checking out.

It happened. It finally happened. Months of patience, practice, swing changes, video taping, and magazine reading.

As a golfer, and an avid one at that, I have never scored lower than a forty. I've scored higher than 50 (mayber even higher than 55) but never below forty.
So today, after shooting a 47 and a 50, I made a small swing change. My arms had come loose. They needed to be closer to my body. That was it. After eight holes I was one over par. Should I par the last hole, an inordinately long par four, I would walk away from the course with a scorecard that read 37. My drive was long, just off the fairway in the first cut on the left side. I was about 180yds from the pin. I hit a 7 iron fat leaving me about twenty yards to the hole. I chipped onto the green but I had an up hill putt with a huge mound in front of it. Maybe a twenty-five foot putt. I made a nice stroke towards the hole. This left me about a four and a half feet to finally break forty. If I made this putt I would have scored a 38.

Now I know the significance of this in the scheme of things is really really...insignificant. I know there are much larger things for me to be worrying about than whether or not I break forty or fifty. But there are such paralells with golf and art and spirituality. I don't really want to write a post about how golf is validated by some mamba jamba "artwords and spirituality this and that , so I'll keep this short. Both Art and golf are things you never master. I really have had these great days painting where I think, I might actually be an artist some day. Perhaps people will really care about my work some day. But there are other times when I think, "what am I doing wasting my time with this. Look at that eye. No one has an eye on their cheek, but I just spent three hours (shading the upper lip) painting this eye on this persons cheek. I should have been an economist."

Well, Golf is the same way. When you drive the ball a long way, maybe close to three hundred yards, and your approach shot lands behind the pin and spins backward toward the hole and you drain your putt for birdie, crazy thoughts enter your head. "Maybe I can still make it to the Tour." But the sport can not be mastered. There are days on the golf course when eyes are drawn on cheeks, even after hours of practice.

Spirituality is a bit different. It's one we know can not be mastered. There is no hope of ever mastering it. Spirituality has no Green Jacket and no Metropolitan.
The goal we work towards is for another.

I missed the putt. Four and a half feet and I missed the putt. Now I'm faced with a three and a half foot putt, which is how far my ball rolled past the hole, to save a double bogey and a 39. Should I miss this putt I will have once again, for the third time this year triple bogeyed the last hole to shoot a 40. I didn't labor over it. I picked a line and hit it towards the cup. The putt fell. I pumped my fist. In the distance I heard the crowd yelling, "Tigerrrr." I wondered what size jacket I wore. I wondered how hard that putt would have been if my eye had been on my cheek. I wondered what made me say "Economist." I didn't wonder what it felt like to break 40.