The benefits of concentration

Oct. 2, 2008

Dear Leslie,

One night a week, the cooling temperatures of fall don't affect DC. She is learning how to blow glass at the Third Degree Glass Factory in St. Louis. Third is the degree of burn potential while blowing glass.

The atmosphere near the furnaces is torrid. Great care must be taken. A fine concentration is one of the demands.

The people in the class move with their partner as if dancing at the edge of hell. It's a pas de deux with pipes and cooling vats and hammers and a fragile, glowing orb they nurse and coddle into being. Each movement is choreographed by a young artist who might rather be creating her own glass pieces than teaching the basics to middle-aged professionals, but she knows that same want, the desire to create something from nothing that brought the students to the glass factory.

The high level of concentration required is the reason I don't fly airplanes, ride motorcycles or take a glass-blowing class. These are no activities for people prone to space out occasionally. All it would take is one little daydream.

Golf is much safer. Golf requires only that you concentrate for the two seconds that elapse during a swing. Yet to not think and to yield control to your subconscious for those two seconds might be the hardest of feats.

My home library includes many books about the mental side of playing golf. "The Inner Game of Golf" prescribes a simple mantra -- da da -- to say to yourself during the swing. The idea is to think of nothing to keep you from thinking about things -- like the lake in front of you or the shot you just hit into the woods -- that can only disturb your golf swing.

DC would gag reading this, but I think of a beautiful golf shot as an artistic creation. Grounded in the training and planning that preceded it, the shot springs from a grassy ballet of graphite and steel, muscle and sinew, alignment and rhythm.

The game can be a great teacher. When I practice and play, some new discovery presents itself if I allow it to. And if I space out, think of almost anything aside from nothing, a bad shot is the result. But that's no third-degree burn.

Last week DC returned home from her glass-blowing class with an admission that she burned her partner. I said nothing about playing with fire. She felt bad. Then she plunked down her first actual vessel. Clear and about twice the size of a shot glass, it sort of slumps to one side. She was disappointed.

She shouldn't be. I still hit golf shots that sometimes look like that.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.