Pitchmarks #27 - 31st December 2023 - New Year's Resolutions

Four kindred spirits admiring the view from Cleeve Hill. Or imagining new holes.

I’ve a folder of them somewhere, past New Year’s Resolutions. I enjoy the process, but it’s a fallacy to think we’ll just change overnight; the habits experts tell us that. Change for the better is hard work, and so I remain - as 50 looms at the end of next year - yet to run a marathon, or to wear a six-pack. Or manage a hundred other things I’d like to do but can’t, or haven’t, or maybe never will. Seeing Augusta is among them. And Covesea.

In “The War of Art”, Steven Pressfield wrote about the strange energy that keeps us from our work - or our dreams - “Resistance”, and described it as a disrupting force against “any act that rejects immediate gratification in favour of long-term growth, health or integrity”. His marvellous list of common intentions against which Resistance will rise includes “the pursuit…of any creative art”, and “any activity whose aim is tighter abdominals”.

But as I look back at previous editions of my Resolutions, I can see how “writing” slowly emerged in recent years, quietly and almost ashamedly - even in documents for my eyes only. Some variation of “play more golf” might as well have been the sub-title of the template, so ubiquitous was its presence, but “writing” snuck out and onto the page from wherever it had been hiding - in the back of my mind, or perhaps in the centre of my heart. Over the past two years, those twin objectives have leapt off the page and into my life, collaborating in a way that I couldn’t have anticipated.

Golf makes me a better person, I know that. It’s the quiet code of the game - where etiquette and respect are required, expected. It’s the enforced patience golf requires; the humility it breeds, of even the greats. It’s the element of surprise around every dogleg; one minute a top, the next a holed bunker shot. The flushed drive before the dreaded sh*nk. The member’s bounce back off the tree or the violent lip-out. Golf plays out the ups and downs of life in a little over three hours.

Then there’s the places we play - at large in the great outdoors, away from air conditioning and screens and queues and passwords. Any swing thought that might seem to be a password to golf’s higher plane is likely to last for a hole or two at best; in golf we mostly have to start again with every single shot. But therein lies its challenge, and its allure.

All of this helps, and so 2022 & 2023, when I actually did “play more golf” - and beat Resistance if not par - are probably the happiest years of this life so far, or at least since the teenage ones, when my infatuation with what Wodehouse called (presumably from his listed abode in “the sixth bunker, Addington Golf Club”) this “capricious goddess” of golf began.

But golf is a social game, and so much of what has brought me joy, and ideas, and progress in the last couple of years has come from the many friends, old and new, who also reside in this echo chamber of the greatest of games. Wodehouse also said that “the only way of really finding out a man's true character is to play golf with him. In no other walk of life does the cloven hoof so quickly display itself”, but perhaps I have just been lucky in golf’s global roll-up by not spotting any cloven hoofs along the way.

Instead, through golf, and this blog, and the book that somehow leapt from my ‘23 Resolutions list into the hands of a few hundred kindred spirits, I have made more precious memories than I have any reasonable right to own, only a few of which are held in the images of this week’s post. I have camped overnight in laybys in order to trade alternate shots or spicy curries with Americans in Scotland; I have sprinted round Irish links in driving rain with only a six iron and my drenched and smiling partner for company. I have played golf in the desert, across the heath and the moor, on the links and even on the beach. And most of those, most nights in my dreams.

When 27 holes at Durness isn’t quite enough golf…; image courtesy of Dogleg Media

I have written what seems like a million words about golf, and read in response a million more, and what comes across again and again is how lucky we are to play this game, and through it to better know each other and ourselves. I repeat, golf makes me a better person, and if Jim Rohn was right when he said that “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”, then I am even more grateful that I get to spend so much of my time - in spirit and in person - with other golfers. Our laughter and smiles bounce off the trees and the flagsticks and drift around the world, I’m sure of it. And we need more of that at the moment.

Something else I picked up from Steven Pressfield is what he calls “the foolscap method”; a way of planning a piece of writing such that it flows in a logical way, and I often use it to try and bring structure to my ramblings. It works well, and I tried to do it today - tried really hard - but somehow this piece is different and so I just sat down and typed instead, and sometimes I cherish this freedom. Plans are great - Resolutions are helpful - but if golf has taught us anything, surely it is that we must remain loose in order to get anywhere.

So I do have a list of Resolutions for 2024, or more accurately, for my 50th year, and I will do my best to tick a few of them off. But I won’t weld myself to them, will try to remain detached from the result of each effort, each shot, each sentence. It’s a Leap Year approaching, and - to steal a few words from one of the more precious connections I was gifted in 2023 (DN; our brief coffee was a highlight!) - “I can’t wait to find out what happens tomorrow”.

I’ll see you there, I hope. In the meantime, thank you, and…

Happy New Year!

An edited selection of highlights! 2023...