CHALLENGING BUT ATTAINABLE

Approaching the Tee Box, Archdale, NC

One of my favorite definitions I have always liked to use and repeat regarding forecasting and personal improvement goals is that they are thoughtfully considered to be “challenging but attainable”.  And it’s interesting how many things in life this can affect.  One of the main attractions of the game of golf is that it so imitates life itself and can never be perfected.  I’ve commented many times that if the game were easy, we’d quickly lose interest.  Nobody can accuse the game of life as easy.  Maybe that’s why?  If you’ve ever lost interest in life, such as during a pandemic lockdown, consider if you’re not challenging yourself enough. 

As I’ve advanced through the many stages of life and aging, this truism has been reinforced many times over.  A child’s ten-piece puzzle isn’t much of a challenge compared to a puzzle of one thousand pieces.  If the final conquest of holing a putt was into a one-foot diameter hole, the skill and attention to putting would most certainly be diminished.

One of my favorite Clint Eastwood movie lines is that “a man’s got to know his limitations.”  I ran cross country in high school.  If you ever see me running these days, you’d better join me!  I work out at the gym (in better times), but I do not join the gym rats in their routines.  That’s why we now have multiple tee boxes on a golf course.  Many courses no longer label them as women’s, senior’s, flat belly’s, etc.  The tees are colored differently and the score cards simply state the total course length from each color.  You choose which tee is “challenging but attainable” for your game in time.  At yesterday’s PGA championship one of the pro golfers hit a five iron 250 yards!  Before I switched my five iron to a hybrid club, I hit that club 150 yards.  That’s why he plays from the back tees and I play much further up to keep it real!    

All of life is a circle, sunrise to sunset, season to season.  We start moving back to the longer tee boxes as we progress in the game and then we gradually begin to move back up as the gift of time passes.  It’s called growing up in the game and then growing old gracefully, while we’re still in the game.