From Mini-Golf to Golf

Lesson from the course

Playing mini-golf was exciting. It was a break from the day. After the afternoon pool and before the aperitive game. A simple and joyful activity.

I remember playing mini-golf in Grasse, down the south of France. Every summer, our family went to this humble club.
My brother and I played billiards, swam, ate ice cream, played hide-and-seek, and ultimately played mini-golf.

The mini-golf practice was under the pines. I remember my hands sticky because of the tree sap that oozed here and there. Practice borders cracked all over the place, as any aged mini-golf course does.
The sun never hit too hard. It was golden hour.
Our games moved to the rhythm of cicadas. The ones we only heard and the ones we could see: molts clinging like Alien's facehuggers.

We're not serious about it when we're kids. But as we grow up, play fades away.
Now, we're looking for serious activities. We want to play golf. Take lessons. Watch the professionals. Learn from the best. And ultimately make our way to the fairway.

It's a whole different game. There's no way around it: it pays the rent and feeds our ego.
We like to play golf. As much as we did with mini-golf.
Yet it's not much of a break anymore: we are actually taking vacations from it. But even when we pause, we have golf on the back burner.

Sometimes we ask ourselves about the purpose of this game. A question we never asked when we were playing mini-golf.

We feel nostalgic about the kid's kind of joy.

It's not the plays we're missing. It's the context. The before and after mini-golf.
We miss the naive. The non-important. The fact that it was a liminal space in our day.

We can change our views to get back to this feeling.
We don't have to play golf. We get to play golf. It's a chance. It's what the kid in us always dreamed of.

We feel the liminal state. It's not the golden hour anymore. It's a good stressful meeting. The scare opportunities. That risky project. The holes waiting ahead.
It's getting in the green: the place where consistency and luck come in duality.

The golf course keeps cracking and our hands are eventually dirty. But joy lives in daily practice. Swinging that 7 Iron again and again.
Sometimes we miss the hole and lose track of the ball.
But it's the swing we put into the driver that drives our meaning-making.
Not where the ball falls.