Cogito ergo scribo

My golfing couch Daniel was sick (stomach flu) and gotta cancel the lesson yesterday, so 贝 and i went to the driving range for practice instead. Daniel would have been so embarrassed to have me as one of his students if he had seen my swing. I was terrible; incorrigible, almost.

Golf is a tough sport. The body coordination required for the perfect swing is so unnatural to human normal movement. For instance, when doing the down swing, we gotta turn our hips first, then followed by the shoulders and hands. Who in the world turns with the hip first in normal situation? Imagine that you are turned to your left and then someone calls you from your right. Now, you are gonna response to the person by facing him but you turn with your hips first. Isn't that so unnatural? Uh huh, that's golf for you. To master it, i gotta make all the unnatural movements go naturally into my swing. All the movements should just happen without thinking, very much like driving a car. Gotta register them into the muscle memories.

Beside body coordination, golfing requires great concentration as well. Slight distraction would result in the players making a bad swing or missing the ball totally. That's where i have a big problem -- i'm a person with short attention span and who gets distracted easily. I'm especially self-conscious when people are around me or looking at me. That's bad, really bad, since having spectators is something that can't be avoided in any sports. I guess that explains why i'm not an athletic person, beside the reason of being too lazy.

No matter how tough golfing is, bad swings can always be analyzed, and as long as we follow the right way of doing it, we can sure master it sooner or later by practising more. However, the same couldn't be said about relationships. Yap, maintaining a relationship is even tougher. There's no fixed formula that guarantees to make every relationship works. Forget about those self-help books or seminars that claim to teach you how to maintain a perfect relationships. Those are nothing more than profiteering gimmicks. People are different and situations vary as well; what works for a couple doesn't necessarily work for another.

贝 and i had a tiff (again) a few days back. I guess that's part and parcel of being in a relationship, but what made me really sad was when he asked me if he could no longer make me happy. My tears just rolled down when he asked me that. I don't know which made me sadder, his perception that i'm unhappy to be with him, or the hurt that he must had felt from such perception. It hurt me to think that he was hurt.

How i wish relationships can be more like golfing. We may not be able to become good golfers in a short time but practice makes perfect. Relationship? Well, regardless of the number of relationships one has gone through, or how hard one tries to do the right things, the result may still not be what we have wished for.

We should, however, approach relationships very much like learning golf. No matter how tough it is, we should always work at it to make it better. It may never become perfect; we may still do a bad swing every once in a while, very much like the occasional arguments and disagreements in a relationship. But every setback is a lesson learnt, and we should never stop believing that things will only get better with time. Yes, they always do.

Labels: golfing, love