LETTERS FROM HOME: THAT'S MY STORY, AND I'M TIRED OF STICKING TO IT

March 12, 1998

Dear David,

Our friends Karin and John are moving to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico at the end of the school year. He teaches science now but will teach math in Mexico. Karin, who is a dentist, will give up the chair to be his teacher's aide.

They are living life as I think it was meant to be lived, adventurously. And their children, Inga and Christien, are learning that lesson along with all the others that arise in the confrontation with an alien culture.

Never having lived in a land where the language and customs are foreign -- save California that is, -- I can only intuit that Inga and Christien will grow and be nurtured by the experience. They are babes. Their beliefs are still being molded by experience instead of the other way around.

In "Extraordinary Golf," Fred Shoemaker writes that most adults concoct stories that illustrate to us who we are and our beliefs! And when something happens that doesn't fit our story, we ignore the experience.

Shortly after moving to northern California, I found myself at a nightclub with a group of newly-made friends. At some point everyone was on the dance floor except me and a lovely, vivacious woman whose own dancing, shall we say, celebrated the body. I'd never met anyone so free. "Why aren't you dancing?" she asked.

"That's my M.O.," I said. That was my story and I was simply sticking to it.

No matter that I really was too shy to dance with her. She didn't fit into my story, and I didn't know how to let the story just happen.

In golf as in life, the art is in embracing what is really happening at that moment. Instead of falling back on the false security of your last swing -- no matter how good or disastrous -- or your last job, romance or chat with a neighbor, you embrace the seeming chaos of the unknown.

When you give up your formula, your story, in a way your identity, you experience golf, Shoemaker would say, for perhaps the first time. For the first time you aren't removed from the experience, monitoring your technique, but fully engaged.

I think the same thing occurs in life. In an alternative reality, I asked that woman to dance. And I discarded that M.O. because it didn't work for me as it must have once upon a time.

Everyone could benefit from ditching our stories, to be soft when the situation calls instead of playing tough, to stand up when needed instead of always acquiescing, to get and dance with the joy of being alive.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.