Free Refills

Jerry and I both take a pretty dim view of the quality of golf instruction we see around. One recent example: we were at the range and watched an instructor give a “junior clinic.” Mostly he seemed to be doing little more than providing the kids with balls. One little girl of about eleven was swinging entirely from her arms, no shoulder turn at all, and so unsurprisingly was hitting without any power and without any accuracy. She clearly wasn’t having any fun. If the point of the exercise was simply to make contact with the ball, it’s really no harder to swing from core than than it is with the arms, but he didn’t offer her one word of explanation. From what we could see, all she learned that was that she has no power and that golf isn’t fun. Not only could we not see how this “clinic” was serving her, we thought it was likely to her detriment.

More broadly, if golf instruction were better, wouldn’t more people be better at golf? I came through this winter of teaching skiing with many criticisms of the way skiing is taught, but I’ll say this: with a little application, a novice skier can learn to ski well enough to actually have fun in just a few days.

Now it’s not unreasonable to say that golf is a harder sport than skiing, but I still think it’s an indictment of the way golf is taught that so many of us don’t get anywhere with our games, and, for as obsessed as we get, so few of us really have fun at the sport.

I’m not suggesting that instruction isn’t important. I came out of a winter of teaching skiing more impressed than ever at the value of good instruction. It’s worthwhile to take advantage of the knowledge of those who’ve come before you.

Nevertheless, neither Jerry nor I have taken a golf lesson since starting TTW. We’re applying our knowledge of energy dynamics and proper body function. We’re experimenting. And we’re definitely seeing improvement.

Still, it’s worth asking: could we speed up that process with some good instruction?

By definition, the answer is yes: good instruction helps you learn more quickly. But the sticking point–and what I intend to discuss over the next few weeks–is that it depends very much on what you mean by good.

Life is hard, and it’s not for me to decry simple escapism–sometimes we need to escape–but I notice among the people who share my passion for sports that the sporting event doesn’t end when the event ends, not if it matters. We remember it. We talk about it. Our relationship with it, the way we carry it inside us, becomes a piece of our very identity.

To the non-fan, of course, this seems insane. But we know better.

Clinton and Trump are obviously both horrible candidates, so today I am announcing my candidacy for president of the United States. My campaign slogan will be “Make America Great for the First Time.” The gist being that no country that hasn’t won a World Cup, or at the very least isn’t legitimately competitive at the international level, can truly be considered great. I mean, after the beating they handed us last night, we’re practically a protectorate of Argentina.

Those of us who are really avid in our sports watching hope, I think, to experience something more than simple diversion. Surely I’m not the only one who sometimes sees the endless parade of ostensibly important sporting events as a pretty devastating indictment of the idea of any real meaning to life–“Oh, hey, this person/team won this tournament, let’s talk about it for a few days until the next one rolls around, and then we can forget all about it.” Just entertainment, as ephemeral and nutritious as cheese doodles or Twinkies. A moment’s pleasure, then gone, no greater value, no greater meaning.

A full moon on the summer solstice. Auspicious, but a big energy today. Best to tread carefully. Nonetheless, happy summer solstice!

Of the four Great Seasonal Holy Days, it is only the summer solstice that brings for me a sense of sadness. It is the longest day of the year–which means that tomorrow will be shorter, and the day after shorter still. It is the peak. Already I find myself contemplating the coming darkness.

Perhaps this is not inappropriate?

Anyway. Today we start Free Refills season six. Can you believe it? Game of Thrones needed six years to make it to season six. Their season five was boring, and it took until the end of their season six to get really interesting. In the meantime all kinds of interesting things happened and are happening at Free Refills.

One thing that didn’t happen during season five was me really following through on my equinox promise to finally bring the look and function of Free Refills more in line with my vision for the site. I did do a lot of thinking about what the site should look like, and that thinking has paid off in terms of ideas, but now it’s clear to me that it’s going to take a lot of coding to bring those ideas to fruition.

I can see that process being two particular types of hard. One, where you’re searching for something and you’re stumbling ahead and the task seems impossible right until you find the thing you’re searching for. Two, where every decision has myriad ramifications and requires huge amounts of learning. I worry about disappearing into a black hole of time, where my time falls in and nothing at all comes out. The whole thing scares me. But the work has to happen. It just has to. Because I have said again and again that Free Refills is not a blog–because it’s not a blog–but, you know, show don’t tell, amiright? I’m trying to make online publishing, and staying in front of people, something that has real salience to my career. I’m trying to push the state of the art forward. I’m trying to do something genuinely new. Free Refills is meant to be the home base for my entire career, and I’m not a blogger. That’s not the work I’m meant to do. The immediacy of the medium is its greatest strength and its devastating weakness. Forgive me if this sounds grandiose, but I have higher ambitions.

So it’s clear that I’m going to have to figure out how to make serious changes under the hood, and that means learning, really learning, how the code that runs the site really works, and that’s intimidating. I recently realized that the only safe way to do it is to make my own offline server running all the software I need, so that I can make changes in a environment where it’s not going to hurt anything that’s already up on the site, which, yeah, is just one more task to this project that I fear is going to take a lot of time. But it needs to happen.

That all this scares me, that I feel like I’m going in partly blind, says to me that it’s exactly the most important thing. I have to meet the challenge that’s in front of me, even though–especially though–it’s uncomfortable.

Beyond that, not much changes here. The rules stay the same. 5,000 words/week, every week, and some kind of new content gets published every weekday.

As always, thank you for reading.

A piece of wisdom handed down from my music teachers, but applicable to any craft in which we seek improvement, is that it is far better to practice for fifteen minutes every day than to practice for half an hour once every two days, or 45 minutes once every three days, etc.

In the realm of golf, a problem most of us run into with respect to practicing is that practicing golf is an ordeal. We have to go to the practice range, and a trip to the range involves getting in the car. Let’s face it, in the midst of all the other things we do in our daily lives, making a daily trip to the practice range is too much of a hassle. Furthermore, any time we go to the range, we’re going to go for long enough to make the trip worthwhile. We’re not going to make the drive for 15 minutes of quick practice. All of which means that on any given day, we’re unlikely to practice.

We want to get better, and the only way to get better is by practicing, but practicing is a hassle, so we don’t practice. It seems like we have a bit of a conundrum, doesn’t it?

A few weeks ago, I started a different approach to practicing golf: most mornings, I go to my local park and practice there. Now, before I go on, let me be clear: practicing in a park raises a couple of important issues, namely safety and protecting the park. Regarding the former, I only practice with real golf balls when I’m chipping–there just isn’t enough velocity on the ball to hurt anyone, and I’m not going to hit a shot so awry that anyone’s going to be in harm’s way. When I take full swings, I use light foam balls–they’re light enough that I don’t think they’d hurt even if you were standing right in front of one, and obviously I’m not going to hit one at someone directly in front of me. About the latter, because I too would be aggrieved if anyone went to my neighborhood park and tore up the grass, I only hit from a practice mat I put on the sidewalk.

I start my sessions with chipping. I set a bucket out in the grass to use as my target. In the short time I’ve been doing this, I’ve already seen myself improve. I rarely drain one into the bucket, but my grouping around the bucket is getting tighter and tighter. My aim and execution have both dramatically improved.

Afterward, I’ll hit some full-swing shots. Little by little, I’m working with longer and longer clubs. I’m seeing some improvement. Clubs that I couldn’t hit at all a few weeks ago, I’m sometimes able to hit.

As an added benefit, I’m seeing my improvements come much more quickly. Let’s say my limit before frustration sets in is 10 six-irons. Let’s say it takes five sessions of those ten balls, paying close attention and making tweaks, before I see any improvement. If I’m practicing only once a week, it takes more than a month before I see myself improve. If I’m practicing daily, it takes only five days.

I also play with things in a way that I wouldn’t at the range. It’s hard for me to go to the range and feel like I can take half swings, or intentionally mishit shots to learn what that swing feels like in my body. Yes, a ball at my local range only costs ten cents, but it still feels wrong to “waste” balls doing anything less than full swings that I’m trying to hit as well as possible. But at the park, if I’m trying, for example, to understand what it is I do to create that ugly push-slice I tend to hit, I can work on doing it intentionally, and it doesn’t feel like I’m wasting anything.

I’m also noticing that my ability to solve golfing problems has improved. Earlier this week, Jerry and I went to the chipping green, and we were practicing a shot from some really deep grass, and I was not succeeding with my shot. I got a little frustrated but I stuck with it and tried to figure out what I needed to do to hit the shot successfully, and by the third or fourth go-round practicing that shot, I was seeing my shots improve.

Now that I’ve been doing this for a few weeks, I am coming strongly to believe that a major part of the reason that most of us don’t see our golf games improve is that, even for the few of us who actually practice, we don’t practice often enough to get better at practicing itself. By practicing every day, I’m giving myself space to play with how I enter the practice mindset, to play with how I warm-up, and to play with the order of shots that I practice. In short, while I’m practicing, I’m also practicing practicing. My practice sessions themselves are getting more effective.

As I’m seeing the benefits in my own game that this change in approach is bringing, I’m discovering a mission for myself: I want to encourage people to bring to find a way to make practicing less of a big deal, so that we do it more, so that we improve, so that we have more fun.

[from zd/2016/0613]

Of course, who am I to say whether or not there is still magic to be found at Apogaea or any other festival? Who am I to define someone else’s experience?

Let me share a story. Tickets to Burning Man 2011 sold out within hours of going on sale. The event had never sold out before; everyone was taken by surprise. Substantial numbers of long-time Burners, who’d gotten accustomed to being able to buy tickets well into the summer, suddenly found themselves ticketless. The theme camps whose ranks these Burners filled suddenly found themselves lacking the resources and labor they’d grown to rely on. Without enough tickets, the theme camps said, we can’t do what we do. And BMorg said (rightly, I think), “Sorry. That’s too bad.” And so many of those long-time camps didn’t go that year.

The result was a huge shift in the culture. When I first went, back in 2005, photo sharing existed, but not with nearly the ubiquity that Facebook brought to our lives, and so we weren’t all inundated with our friends’ pictures from Burning Man. First-timers back then substantially didn’t know what they were getting themselves into. But by 2011, everyone had seen pictures from Burning Man, everyone knew what it was supposed to look like, and though the many, many first-timers who went that year brought a great deal of new energy, they came with a preconceived notion of what Burning Man was based on what they’d seen in photos. The result was a festival that was more visual and more on-the-surface, with less space to go deep. It was more of a party and less a space geared intentionally toward transformation. Let me be clear: I’m not saying this was good or bad, just that it happened. Things change.

My friend John went that year for the first time. Going in, John’s outlook on the world tended toward the darker side. He liked a good party and knew how to have a good time, but he also was world-weary and quite cynical. He didn’t seem to find much meaning in the world. But John came back from that first Burn genuinely transformed. He immediately began to make substantial changes in his life. He saw things that were no longer serving him and began to remove them. His outlook brightened. Not long after that Burn, he moved boldly toward a career in which he could legitimately devote his life to helping people. These were not surface changes. He lives them still.

Two years later, my friend Richard, whom I’d met at Apo 2013, went to his first Burning Man. A few weeks afterward, I ran into him at the Denver Decompression party. This was late September, two months after my dad died and two weeks after the Boulder floods filled my basement with raw sewage. I think it’s fair to say that things were kinda tough in my life right then, but sometimes you don’t know just how much the weight of the world is crushing you down until someone can serve as a mirror for you. Richard threw his arms around me in a big hug, and I just stared at him for a long moment, literally gaping. To this day I think he thinks I didn’t recognize him, but honestly it wasn’t that. It was that the gulf between our respective energies–his still glowing with joy from the Burning Man experience, mine heavy with grief and loss–was so wide that it left me stunned.

Even after the what I saw as the shift in the depth of the Burning Man experience, John and Richard both went to the desert and came back transformed.

So maybe I am wrong that there was no magic to be found this year at Apogaea. Maybe I don’t see it anymore because I’ve already integrated it into my life. I don’t need it anymore. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I used to say that the starting point for the magic of Burning Man and related festivals was found in spending multiple days in a place where people are really, truly happy. And until you’ve experienced it, you might not realize just how rare that really is. Perhaps this year’s first-timers walked away with wide eyes.

Be all that as it may, I don’t shy away from my ultimate conclusion from Tuesday’s piece: those of us who were given the vision did not come back and change the world. It’s not enough to live with open eyes. We have to step onto the path that lies before us. We can no longer wait. It’s time.

Because I carefully marshaled my energy before, during and after, I can say now that this Apogaea was worth the energy I spent on it, but still, here it is three days after, after three nights of sleeping in my own bed, and still today I find myself in such a fog of fatigue that I can barely think.

Worth it, but don’t disregard the cost.

Last night my friend C.K. and I were catching up about our respective Apo experiences, and the first question she asked me was, “What was the best thing that you saw?” It struck me at first as kind of a strange question–why would what I saw be the most interesting thing to ask me about?–but as I swallowed my initial impulse to waggishly respond something about some cute little raver chick, I realized how odd it was that the question struck me as odd. It used to be that you could basically count on seeing something surprising, remarkable, and even fantastical at a festival.

I hesitated for a few moments as a new recognition of this change sank in. I answered, “You know, I had a lot of fun, but I can’t say I saw or experienced anything particularly magical.” And C.K. agreed.

The jaded old Burner who grumbles about how the festivals used to be better is a tired cliché in the Burner world, and I’ve noticed that when I ask people from the new generation if they’re having a good time, they are always extremely positive about the experience. But it is deeply hard for me to imagine that they’re experiencing much in the way of magic. What the festival seems to provide now is a great party, and the new generation seems to be there for that. They’re mostly raver kids. You see it how they dress, how they hold themselves, how they spend their time.

Right now you’re probably ready to accuse me of being that boring, jaded old Burner who can’t shut up about how it used to be better, but I don’t think that’s quite accurate, not this time. I think the new generation is completely content to have the festival be nothing more than a party because that’s what they’re expecting. Why is that? When my generation came back from our first Burns, we said we’d seen a vision for a new world. In the festivals, we saw a model for a more just, more beautiful, all around better society. We believed our culture could change the world.

I don’t think the narrow, good-times expectations of the new generation reflects their failure. I think it reflects ours. The new generation doesn’t have deeper expectations than big, noisy fun because that’s what we brought them. We came out talking about changing the world, but we didn’t change the world. All we really ever did was throw great parties.

On Sunday, I re-entered the regular world to the news that a madman had gone to a nightclub in Orlando, FL, and used a big gun to kill 49 people. Allow me to offer this reflection: if ever the world needed some changing, now is the time.

I’m back from my weekend at Apogaea. Somewhat to my surprise, I’m feeling now that this Apo won’t end up being my last festival. I spent the entire weekend telling myself it wasn’t worth the energy expenditure–right up until the moment that I discovered I’d changed my mind.

What ended up being the difference? I’m still working on figuring that out. The best I can say so far is that the festival experience offers a really interesting place to explore all that I’ve learned over the past couple of years about maintaining a sense of flow and ease in the face of life’s challenges.

Over the rest of this week, I hope to understand better what conclusions I can draw from the experience.