LETTERS FROM HOME: SEEKING CLUES TO TORQUE AND THE BLOND INFINITY

May 18, 2000

Dear Julie,

When you stop learning is probably the moment you begin dying.

It's just a hunch. I don't think it matters what you learn from -- a story, an intimate conversation, your task, a health change -- only that you are not the same person you were the day before.

One thing I love about golf is the infinite opportunities it presents to learn about the techniques and subtleties of sport itself and more often about being alive.

Playing golf is a lot like dreaming. You are placed in scenarios that might seem threatening -- in golf, only to your ego -- but whether conjured from the ether or fallen into from an elevated tee box, these situations allow you to rehearse how you will react when something similar happens in the version of your life you like to think of as real.

Some golfers play in fear of making a mistake. To live that way is the biggest mistake of all.

One attribute needed in golf is flexibility -- both physical and psychological. At the transition point from back swing to down swing, you twist into a position that creates torque between the upper body and the trunk. The correct use of torque enables some people to hit a golf ball nearly out of sight.

The game also puts you into situations that challenge your abilities to concentrate, to remain calm when agitation seems only natural, and most of all to confront adversity. It teaches you to be flexible.

Recognizing the value of flexibility, I attempt to stretch my sinew and my psyche on a blue yoga mat.

The class consists of neophytes like me who forget to breathe when we're struggling to bend a limb in a direction it has never been bent and are still a bit uncomfortable saying "Namaste" when we conclude the session.

Namaste is a Sanskrit word meaning "I bow to the divine in you."

My yoga teacher, Lori, usually begins each class with an aphorism meant to enlighten. Slowly with small stretches she inducts us into the realm where mind and body meet, the place T.S. Eliot called "the stillpoint of the turning world."

It is where I try to swing a golf club from, the mystical, infinitesimal center around which all else revolves. To do this I think of being in mountain pose, Tadasana, my toes spread upon the earth, feet rooted as if reaching far beneath the ground, hips slightly tucked, knees lifted, gaze softened, jaw relaxed.

My golf teacher, Mike, probably would think this odd. He is all about angles of the spine and club, and is always seeking new images to help me visualize his teaching. He uses different words to describe how it should feel to stand before the golf ball, but what he says looks like mountain just the same.

I knew one of my fellow yoga classmates in high school. She was a pretty girl with short blond hair who suddenly began smiling at me in the hall between classes. Shy, the most I could do was smile back.

She talked to my best friend, who began badgering me to ask her out. They talked so much about me he finally asked her to a dance himself.

Eventually the two of them arranged for me to meet her at the Roll-O-Fun skating rink. She must have thought me a jerk for standing her up. I suppose I was. Immobilized by the fear of a 16-year-old girl, I sat in my car in the parking lot watching her come to the doorway again and again to peer out into the darkness.

I did manage to ask her for a date finally. We went to a movie and held hands. I guess it was too anticlimactic. End of romance.

In class, mountain that I am, I look at her fearlessly.

Namaste.

Love, Sam