“You’re just kinda there, wondering which way to go next.”
Have you ever been on a golf course you weren’t sure where the next hole is?
There are no signs or clearly laid paths to follow to find the next place you’re supposed to go?
You’re just kinda there, wondering which way to go next.
This happened to me the other day. A course near my house, once consisting of 27 holes, had downsized to 18 and left the other 9 holes to wither away over the past few years. Understandably so, since golf courses are expensive to maintain and I’m sure it was costing an arm and a leg to keep the entire facility up and running.
Recently though, they decided to do what they could to save that portion of the course and bring it back as best they could. Without an enormous influx of cash, it would’ve been hard to bring back all 9 holes in their full capacity, so they turned it into a shorter par 3 course.
They used the tees and greens that they could, creating a new routing to make it playable.
The problem, however, was that they never actually created a new path to get you from hole to hole. They left the old path in place and now it’s just confusing as all hell.
The signs don’t seem to make any sense and some of the holes are still under construction, leaving me to wonder where to go next pretty much all day.
It was like a being trapped in a maze, except that there were no walls or boundaries with which to guide you anywhere, let alone to the end of the course.
I got a similar feeling upon waking up this morning. The question, “what’s next?” kept popping into my head.
I often feel that we humans feel the need to keep pressing forward. The need for progression, to create something new and advance our lives in a way that benefits us somehow. But many times, I wonder if we’re going in the right direction.
Sometimes, I believe we feel this urge to press forward so strongly that we just can’t, physically or mentally, sit still and we have to do something to progress.
Oftentimes, we don’t proceed in the right direction.
It’s hard to know which way to go, especially when we don’t have any prior experience to gauge our direction by and can when given multiple options, the odds of us picking the perfect path are pretty slim.
Hindsight is 20/20 as they say. We always know which way we should’ve gone after the fact, but that doesn’t help us in the moment.
Occasionally, I wonder what would happen if we just stayed in the moment for a while and didn’t make any movements, would the right path forward become more clear?
For me, I’m not sure. I find myself getting stuck in the moment at times, unable to move, encapsulated by fear of choosing the wrong path. But then again, when I slowed down and looked around, it allowed me time to weigh the facts around me and look at the situation logically enough to find the next tee box.
Maybe, Goldilocks was right. Maybe you have to try all the paths to find the right one. But maybe, if she’d slowed down, she’d have seen the steam above the bowl of porridge and averted a burnt tongue.