How to learn the game of golf and maybe even life itself

Years ago, I played tennis almost every day. This was in North Carolina. I played a lot with a good friend, Bill Beery, often several mornings a week, before going to work.

We played pretty evenly. Maybe he beat me a little more than I beat him. I can't remember.

But I do remember one match in particular.

Bill was going to Thailand for two years, to serve as the Peace Corps Health Director there. We were playing one last match; in fact, we had time only for one set. He was catching a plane later that morning.

As it turned out, I could do nothing wrong, and he was struggling. I could feel Bill's growing frustration, and my growing exultation.

Finally he left, totally frustrated. I had won, 6-0.

If we had had more time, we would have played on, and I am sure that the pendulum would have started swinging back in Bill's direction.

I remember that game of tennis precisely because it's the wrong way to experience any game, focused entirely on the result.

There is a wonderful book on golf, a game I have never learned to play but have read two or three books about, thinking I might try it some day. The book is Extraordinary Golf by Fred Shoemaker. Shoemaker was an accomplished collegiate golfer years ago. He almost went on the pro tour but eventually became burned out. He quit altogether, for years.

Today, he is one of the most popular golf teachers in the country.

To sum up Shoemaker's philosophy in a few short paragraphs is not easy, but I will try.

Golf can be learned one of two ways. You can, like most, consider it a game that is not natural or easily learned, and then spend a lifetime (and a fortune) trying to get the instruction and the practice to master a vast set of complex motor skills while wearing green pants.

The second approach, the more Zen-like approach, is coming to understand that the body already knows how to learn to play golf. The challenge is to use awareness and our intuitive learning skills to slip past our thinking and controlling minds filled with the "shoulds" of playing golf.

For example, Shoemaker has people swing a club naturally but, instead of trying to hit the ball, he has them release the club, throwing it out toward the target.

Then he has them hit the ball their regular way, observing the "shoulds" of good form (keep your head steady, watch the ball, etc.), that they have learned from various pros and instruction books.

Invariably, the average golfer will throw the club in a way that is closer to good bio-mechanical form rather than by swinging according to some ideal form.

To Shoemaker, the main task in golf is to become more aware of how we actually swing, good or bad. This awareness allows the body itself to learn how to move ever closer to the form it needs, and to gradually let loose of most of the ideas of form stored in our heads.

Good form has its place, but it has to grow mainly from the inside. It must not only be imposed from the outside.

There is much more to his book, including chapters on how increasing awareness can lead to a trust in one's own body and swing, and how to open to the joy of playing extraordinary golf, at any moment.

All of these rules apply to tennis as well, and to all of life. We already know much of what we need to know or to learn. We learn faster through awareness of what we actually do rather than through trying to fit what we do to some imposed pattern.

In the concluding chapters of his book Shoemaker broadens his argument even further, making golf a spiritual practice much like Zen.

Spirituality (in contrast with religion) is not concerned with imposing external rules and admonitions onto a people or an individual. Nor is spirituality necessarily linked to seeking God. Spirituality is more about seeking insight or what the East calls enlightenment.

Spirituality works from the inside out; religion works from the outside in.

Spirituality is learning to live by slipping past the "shoulds" of pious admonitions in order to listen and wait for the body (including the body's mind), acknowledging that through stillness, awareness, and a steady process of learning, we will arrive at a truer, larger sense of self.

Discovering life itself and your truer self is not like peeling back layers of old wallpaper, getting down to the real stuff; it's more like learning to open up to the self that you become when you meet the next person or task with an empty mind, a mind that is not already made up and refuses to learn, a mind that is not lost in the kingodm of the familiar.

For instance, every Sunday, I try to attend church, while my wife usually attends the tennis courts in Warren. While I am reciting the deadly familiarity of the Nicene Creed she is trying to see the ball on the tennis courts.

In truth, she may be coming closer to the point of all spiritual practice, which is to learning to see clearly ourselves and the things we are waiting for at any moment, which is is much the same thing as being aware of where life itself is at any moment, whether in the office, in church, on the courts and links, or anywhere.