Weathering the storm
Shut in during the Corona virus pandemic like everyone else. The news cycle holds us with fascination along with necessity, but too much of it reinforces negative fearfulness. So, it’s important for everyone to find time for some pleasant distraction. In that spirit, I’m substituting some golf memories for the usual Dr Rich Golf mental instruction essay.
Today’s golf courses are equipped with high-tech lightning detectors. Whether we like it or not, concerns for our safety (and for owners liability) sets off sirens that warn us when to head back to the clubhouse. In the 1960s, we used a much more primitive warning method. There was no Weather Channel app on a smart phone to announce the exact hour of the storm, or to display a map of lightning strike proximity.
There was, instead, a certain excitement I would feel heading out to play as thunder rumbled into the region. As I teed off, I could feel it in the air, maybe sensing the falling barometric pressure, or the sharpness of the breeze. As thunder rumbled in the distance, I looked up to the sky, and whatever I saw I convinced myself that the storm was not heading towards me. “I think it’s going to pass well to the north, so let’s keep playing. Other golfers, in less denial (i.e., smarter), abandoned the course by twos and fours. As the thunder rumbled louder, I started to feel it inside, like the percussions from the lowest pedals of a massive pipe organ. Lightening glows briefly lit up the bellies of hanging dark clouds. Somehow this did not trigger my flight response. I preferred being part of this ancient experience, to being huddled in the pro shop or at the gin rummy table in the locker room.
I used my own lightening detection system – playing until I could feel my hair ever so slightly standing on end, like in a Mr. Wizard experiment with static electricity, which is exactly what it was. I could feel subtle changes of the angle of hairs on my forearm. I knew then that I was getting too close to the final warning. And by obeying that sixth sense of electric danger, I ended up sitting far out on the course, on a wooden bench, under a slanting shingle roof that extended just far enough overhead, so the cascade of water run-off was just beyond my feet.
I sat with water logged cotton crew socks, because in my final forty yard scamper, I dropped my clubs and took off my golf shoes, because the metal shafts and spikes would otherwise prove too tempting for some blind voltage potential to fulfill its destiny, stabbing itself into the ground, by way of my body. Pounding drafts of rain can be hypnotic. Huddling myself against the back wall of the shelter, I finally noticed I was soaked. In those days, the thin dark blue nylon Penguin zip jacket offered no water proof protection. The actual white noise of the rain is very soothing and is never truly duplicated by modern sound machines. Maybe it was the effects of that sound that led my mind to turn inward. First, I noticed patterns in the golf spike marks imprinted onto the soft blacktop in front the shelter. The pinewood bench, painted golf-forest green, was also pock marked by prior occupants who poked golf tees into the wood, probably out of boredom while waiting out a storm.
The rain cascaded off the roof, almost forming a curtain. I was inside of something, and the rest of the world, the world I was usually a part of, was outside. And just as I felt a strangeness of this separation, a swirl of wind reminded me to tug up my collar and pull my jacket a little tighter to try to stay warm. I was already soaked, and alone, but not lonely. Something very interesting was going on, and I tried to watch it. It was the electricity, the sounds of rain, the wind, the wetness, the isolation. As I watched, a most interesting and strange new insight came from somewhere. “I” was inside this shelter, and this “I” that was sitting on the bench, inside this shelter, had another “I” inside the “I” sitting on the bench. My breathing slowed. I had some dim sense of the thunderstorm agitating the world just outside that curtain of rain cascading off the roof in front of me. I noticed that “I,” the “I” inside of me, felt completely motionless and calm. After some time, as the storm center moved off, I slowly, very slowly turned my head to look over my right shoulder, out towards the course, towards the pond and the thirteenth green.
In the midst of our current storm, there’s a place within yourself that is a shelter, motionless and calm. You can learn to find it, there are many guided meditation sessions, on YouTube, for example. Now is a good time to use them daily. And each time you try, it becomes much easier the next time.