I apologise for the clear lack of golf content today…must have been a technical hitch!
It must be twenty years since I last flicked through a box of long-players, selected one, and carefully slipped out a vinyl disc from the yellowing, crackly dustcover inside. Twenty years since I checked which side to play first, lifted the delicate arm of the record player, and placed the stylus down in the outer groove to await the soft crackles before the magic starts. That pause was never quite the same length, so the whole sensual adventure started with an expectation — a breathless, mindful presence in those moments of waiting.
Of course, it would be extraordinary in modern life to go twenty hours without music arriving at our eardrums from somewhere or other, these brilliant and ubiquitous apps offering limitless options and never-ending playlists. We can select our favourites, and omit the weak songs, and even if we don’t, some algorithm will have worked out what we’d appreciate, long before it occurs to us, and suddenly, we’ve lost control, and awareness of it.
But for some reason yesterday, my train of thought was cast back to those years when I did have the time to sit in a chair and listen, properly listen, to the message the artist wanted to transmit to the world. I would carefully choose from a small collection that my children would find painful in its scarcity, and faithfully follow the story that unfolded, pausing halfway to flip to the “B” side, and the sounds that emerged a soundtrack the would help me find meaning and connection in my teenage life.
Those few albums became ingrained in me, their precious words and thoughtful lyrics an inner dialogue as I felt my way through adolescence and early adulthood; through indecision and uncertainty; through challenge and adventure. This strange ritual, letting the haunting music of Neil and Joni, of Miles and Marvin brighten my days and nights, was so important to me in those years, as was the equivalent inspiration from books, and artists, and the people around me. The intensity of those years gets diluted as real life comes at us, ripping our time and freedom away as we knuckle down to whatever distracted, dictated path we follow.
Somewhere along the line I’ve lost — we’ve lost — the simple beauty of having the leisure time to avoid boredom not with relentless, meaningless notifications, but by being privileged enough to spend the odd hour here and there in the presence of someone else’s magnificent exploration of this strange life. The digital world brings us so many options, but for a moment yesterday, I yearned for the rustic simplicity of a more analogue, intentional experience.
Those albums are still my friends; the nostalgic feeling their sound brings, of a time filled with opportunity and optimism, still moves and inspires me, and as life passes steadily by, the importance to me of finding the space to slow down and appreciate moments of leisure on a more intentional, relaxed basis grows daily. I have chased after the wrong things too many times, and all the while our world has become more frantic, shallow, immediate.
We must take the time to go for a walk without purpose, or to talk to a friend for nothing other than friendship, or to lie on the couch and let an LP spin for us. It is in these moments, which often feel self-indulgent in a world obsessed with charging forwards, that we can feel alive, inspired, present. It is in these rare moments that we feel like we are living our life, making our choices, and not charging towards the end chasing other people’s dreams for them.
We all feel the pressures of the day to day in our lives, but at the same time there has never been such choice and luxury available to us, to pick and choose how we spend our lives, what we select and what we ignore. That’s the key…remembering that we do have a choice, and that each of our decisions is a golden chance to do the right thing, make the right call.
In every moment of every day, we can move towards or away from the person we wish to be, the person we’d like to have been, and in each of those decisions we can make the world a better place for us all to live in.
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