I have been playing golf for a while, not well and not often, but I love the game. In any given round, I lose one or two balls, but while tramping in the weeds or rummaging through pine straw or searching under and around trees, I usually find a lost ball that someone before me yanked off the tee or mishit in the fairway. I am intrigued if it has a company logo, a special event title and date, name of newlyweds, a birthday greeting, or any other clever saying that gives a lifelike quality to a little round ball that just keeps on taking hit after hit!
While visiting a retired golfing buddy in Maine, I shared my fixation with the idea of where a lost golf ball had been and where it will go once found. While enjoying a lobster roll on the deck of his golf club, the character Beau Bridgestone was born!! Tom and I decided to write a little book, Through A Golf Ball’s Eye; A Memoir by Beau Bridgestone. Beau plays courses in the USA and United Kingdom. Beau was lost and found eleven times before his final resting place. We wrote the book from the golf ball’s perspective—what he saw, heard, felt, endured and learned. Beau never lost hope of being found. And had he not been lost, he would have never experienced the extensive travel and adventures that enriched his life.
Had he never been lost, he could not have been found.
I think of Beau often. He reminds me of how many of us are living our lives much like a game of golf. We have days where life is one big hit after another. We grip the club, align our heads to the target, take big backswings and hit through the ball. And then, just as quickly as we think we have that swing mastered, we mishit. We hit out of bounds. We take a one stroke penalty for losing our ball. We push to the right. We pull to the left. One bad shot after another. We land in the weeds. We endure thunder storms and snakes and alligators.
Suddenly a hand reaches down, collects us, brushes us off, slaps our behinds and we again soar STRAIGHT thru the air to the target, landing solidly on the green and in the hole!
One of the first lessons I learned in golf, besides “keep your head down", was to forget the last shot. It is over. Forget the last hole. That hole is finished. Move on the next hole. There is no backing up on a golf course. The next round of golf can be enhanced by learning what we did wrong or right from our last game. A caveat is that practicing the right and correcting the wrong is the answer to an improved future game. So as it is in life, practice does make perfect!
