Swing Speed
I originally posted this on my vox.com blog. I’m reposting it here.
I’ve spent the last few months gathering my thoughts for this post. I have been writing, rewriting, revamping, changing, and generally spending my time in general dissatisfaction with how I was phrasing what I want to say. So I deleted everything I wrote, and am going to do a slightly edited stream of consciousness.
I’m getting old.
Well, not really old, but older. I hit that second significant milestone that differentiates one phase of life from another. I’m thirty. I thought that when I turned 18 I’d feel different, older, smarter, wiser. I was legal to enter into contract, to vote, to get married, and basically do everything except drink. No problem there. I’m not a big drinker (although I do enjoy a good Shiraz every now and then.) Aside from moving from the phase of childhood, being under the care and protection of my parents, there was no real emotional change, at least not the single, revelational change that we attribute to significant life events. I grew emotionally, but it was a process, process which I couldn’t quicken enough.
21 came and went. I got married. Both significant events (marriage obviously being the most dramatic at the age of 22). But I still felt young and inexperienced. I’ve started to accept that phase of life for what it was. But I do look back with some regret. Namely, that I didn’t respect myself enough. At that time I was running a fairly successful consulting firm helping musicians, singers, songwriters, and producers develop and install production studios for recording and mixing, as well as mastering records. I’m good at that. But because I felt young, and didn’t really respect my own ability, I was always questioning whether I had the skills, or the ability to turn this into a successful business. From there, I created a multimedia development firm. We had a few major clients, bringing in thousands of dollars per project. I felt like I should be charging hundreds. This became a difficult to manage. I would have a hard time looking at a potential customer, who was often someone I had an already established relationship with, and ask for what I was actually worth. I had the skill set, the experience, and the work to back it up, but not the belief in myself. I sold that company. I tell myself it was because my life had gotten out of balance. I had kids. I had two other jobs to help put food on the table. My wife worked full time. I wanted to be around more. Ok. That sounds good. But beneath the surface, I’m not really sure that I believed I could operate a profitable company.
I wanted to feel old. I wanted to feel experienced. I wanted to, in my core, know that when I was talking to someone one to two decades my senior, that I was offering something that their life experience hadn’t already seen or knew more about. I wanted to perceive my own value higher than I could accept it.
I turned 30. And guess what? At 30 years old and one day, I was still in the same place emotionally that I was at when I was 29 and 364 days old. No change, except for one key difference. I was physiologically feeling older. I love golf. Love it. I wish I could play more (see the balance part a few paragraphs ago). I had a Neutral bias TaylorMade R5 driver with a stiff flex mid-kick shaft. Great for someone with a fast swing speed. A great driver. But I kept slicing. I’d make all the adjustments I could find. I studied and read more than my fair share of Golf Digest, Golf Magazine, and Golf.com articles. How much Golf Channel can one man watch? A lot. So much that you can get your toddler boys hooked. Everything was pointing towards one of two issues: I had to slow down my swing and/or my driver’s shaft was too stiff (which meant I was swinging too slow). The problem is that if you can’t swing it fast enough, and with enough control, you’ll slice it. So you need to slow down the swing. But if you slow down a swing with a stiff flex driver, you can’t get the head closed in time, and you’ll slice it. I was in an emotional bind. What to do? Then I had the incredible opportunity to spend 3 days at a golf school in St. Augustine, Florida with my father and brother. Just the boys. Incredible. We spent a lot of time working on the basics - iron work primarily. Finally we pulled out the drivers. The instructor was able to get me straightened out, but I wasn’t hitting it very long. Then it came time to get fitted for a new driver. I had stars of a shiny new R7 in my eyes. The tests got under way. I was worried. I’m 30, and a far, far cry from Tiger. My younger, more fit, more athletic, more everything brother came back with a regular flex TaylorMade Burner. I was sick. If he wasn’t hitting it fast, what chance did I have? But much to my delight, I have a swing speed fast enough that I ended up with a stiff flex (albeit custom “backspin killer”) shaft, on a shiny new R7. My instructor took me aside, saw that I was still slicing it, even with the draw bias of this new club, and made one minor adjustment to my grip. Left hand a touch, and I mean a touch, stronger. BAM! I was (am) excited. Maybe I’m not as old as I feel. Wait. Maybe I don’t feel as old as I am.
That was the moment. That was the catalyst I needed to step back and look at where I was, where I am, and where I want to go. Life is about phases and stages. It’s about the clichéd “journey”. Yes, yes. But it’s also about the cumulative experience, and learning from those experiences. I suddenly found myself with a sense of faith in myself. I still have plenty of issues to deal with, that hinder me, but that sense of self-doubt seems to be held at a healthy bay. I’ve learned that some self-doubt is good. We need to be able to question our abilities healthily. Can I do this realistically? If so, should I do this? And if not, I must be able to let go of it. There’s the real struggle.
I needed the struggle of my twenties to get to where I am emotionally in my thirties. I needed that breaking of my ego to realize that I didn’t need to rely so much on my ego. Richard Rohr talks about this in his excellent book “From Wild Man to Wise Man”. If you are of the male gender, you must read it.
The hardest part of life is letting go. We usually associate that with the bad. I have to let go of my swing speed. (Well, I don’t, not yet, but I will eventually). I have to let go of the pain when I lose a loved one. I have a friend who’s father suffered a very serious fall. He lost much of his mobility, with just major motor skills remaining. If all the surgical and physical therapy options don’t work out, I pray that he’ll be able to let go of his former level of mobility and experience everything in life that he has at this moment. But we also have to let go of the parts of life we loved that are less tangible but are so easy to maintain a strangle on. I had a great high-school experience, especially my senior year. But that was over 10 years ago. It’s beyond time to move on. I’m not in high-school any more. I have over 10 years of multimedia development experience. I’m not the little kid begging for work, hoping you won’t see through some sort of façade that belies my inabilities. I had to learn to let go of that. Now, in a life that is closer to balanced, what can I hold on to? What do I have at this moment in time that makes it unique and infinitely livable to the point that I’ll need to learn to let go of it? So much. Family, immediate and extended. Friends. Church. A career. A better understanding of a God who sees me for who I am, and who I can be. My prayer for this season, “Grant me the strength to outdrive my little brother for as long as possible, and when I can’t do that anymore, let me keep my senility long enough to outsmart him in the rest of the game.” (He usually beats me anyway, but I’m longer and straighter off the tee.)
