Is this my all time low?

There's a kind of inner peace of mind that isn't contrived but results from a kind of harmony with the work in which there's no leader and no follower. The material and the craftsman's thoughts change together in a progression of smooth, even changes until his mind is at rest at the exact instant the material is right.

The mid season slump inevitably comes. But I’ve played so much golf this year that my performance looks like a sinusoidal line rising and crashing every 2 weeks.

You’d think you’d get used to the highs and the lows. But you never do. When the game is good it feels easy. You even wonder why it was ever difficult. But when it’s bad, you think you’ll never find it again.

So, friends, I have a question for you. What exactly is one to do when they find themselves in a Trader Joe’s elevator making air practice swings after another horrible round?

Is… that? Is that my all time low? It certainly felt like it.

I’ve been reading this book. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It has nothing to do with golf. But by now you should know I am two steps removed from relating anything back to the game.

One part has really stuck out to me. The author talks a lot about Quality. Capital-Q Quality. He says Quality is something we cannot define, but we all know it when we see it (kinda sounds like that quote from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart on… ummm… let’s call it visual obscenities?).

Anyways, there’s this standard, this physical manifestation of a mind at rest, that brings about a Quality that we all recognize. It’s something different. The author says that the craftsman cannot be separated from the work he produces. A Quality person begets a Quality life and a Quality product and so on and on. Some call it flow, but I suspect the author meant something more than just that constricted mental state. It’s bigger than one singular moment.

And isn’t that the truth? Take your golf game. Don’t we seem to play our best golf when our outside world is all neat and tidy and we can just go… play? Think about that word. We play.

So there I am reading this, blue annotation pen in hand, nodding my head in agreement, ferociously underlining the words that resonate with me. Then it hits me.

Of course, the opposite must also be true. Don’t we seem to play our worst when life is chaotic? As if the outside anxieties somehow creep into our subconscious even if we think we are entirely focused on the round? Perhaps there’s an emotion-brain-muscle network happening behind the scenes—so quick, so unconscious, you don’t even know it’s happening in the moment.

It’s only after the round that you feel the unrest that your tiny muscles and neurons and blood cells must have felt over that snap hook 6 iron from the fairway. It’s only when we take a step back and realize, yeah, I’m not doing as well as I thought I was. Or, if you’re like me, when you’re air swinging in an elevator and you lock eyes with yourself in the reflective stainless steel doors and mouth “wtaf am I doing?”

These moments are the call to arms. I know when I’m at my best. I know the things I do to be at my best. And I definitely know the things I do when I’m at my worst. For a lactose intolerant man, you’d be amazed at how much ice cream I can eat while binging trash TV.

I know I am a better person, a better friend, sibling, son, worker, etc. when I do the things that make me a better person, friend, and on and on. That’s the thing about Quality. It is not who we are or what we do. It is what we do that makes us who we are and who we are that chooses what we do. Ad infinitum. Read that again slowly; it might even make sense.

When I read my own words over, they make sense to me. Good begets good. It’s how I look at the world. But there’s a part of me, maybe it’s my more cynical side, that can’t help but say, “nah, it’s not that deep, man. Your club face is just wide open at impact.” But maybe that’s a rabbit hole for another day.