It All Fits Together, Somehow.
Rescue shots, notebook planners, and Bubba Watson
I think a lot about how different parts of my life connect to each other. Maybe that is a function of preaching almost weekly for 17 years, or maybe that is why I became a preacher. I am constantly on the look-out to see if something connects to something else.
I once heard (or read) Bubba Watson say (paraphrase) that hitting a recovery shot from a bad spot can be easier for him than hitting from the middle of the fairway. When you are stuck behind something or when you only have a little window of space through which you must hit a shot, your decisions are made. There is only one way to execute this. It frees you up. When someone like Bubba (and me) has any number of ways to hit the next shot, or the shot seems so straight forward, my mind might stay “open” such that I start thinking about the next-next shot, or what I might make on that hole, since I am in the perfect spot. It does not take a psychologist or a golf expert to know this could lead to problems.
I also remember Bubba catching flak from British media and fans for his frustration expressed as distaste for The Open Championship and European culture in general (the food, etc). In defense of people like Bubba, sometimes several days with a lack of clearly defined spaces can begin to wear on us subconsciously in ways that can bubble or burst out on others if we are not aware of it. He said something in that episode about preferring tree-lines or borders to the openness of links golf. While I love links golf courses, and I have played some of the best, there are certain courses on certain days where it has felt much less like golf to me1 and more like wandering in a blizzard. If I am on a links style course, the boundaries provided by dunes or natural grasses really make a big difference. I don’t think it is just my American conditioning, it is about my ability (or lack thereof) to focus.
This brings me of course to hardcopy-pen-and-paper-notebook-calendar-planners. I must have a notebook with my calendar in it. I don’t even buy premade calendars, I just manually draw the calendar into a simple notebook keeping all of the other pages free for notes or lists or whatever.
I often find myself thinking about how all of these aspects of my life (my brain, my golf game, my professional life, my attention) are affected by how I am “wired.”
Despite all the ease and simplicity that I truly believe electronic or digital calendars bring to so many lives, I still have to make and keep my calendar in a notebook. I know that I am not the only one, because I see them out there. I know that there are plenty of people who resist digital reign over their lives or who like the physical feel and adaptability of having a planner free from your phone. I agree with all those things, but there is something else for me.
Here (for now) is my best explanations of why it matters to me.
I realized that when I try to use a computer screen or a phone screen for my calendar, nothing seems permanent. Once you have zoomed in on any one day, it looks exactly like any other day. It feels the same. If I go from the full month-screen into the single day-screen by clicking into that day, (as hard as it is to explain) the month disappears, and I lose my bearings. I think that I need the tactile experience of turning the pages to register in my brain that these are two different months. I need to be able to see the relationship between the Sunday that is two rows up and 4 columns to the left2 from the Thursday that I am writing something into. My February and March pages especially have to feel different because until you get to the 29, all of the dates are the same in each row and column (don’t act like you haven’t gotten confused by knowing that something was on Tuesday the 11th only to have to remind yourself that its March and not February.
I need the frames, the windows, the borders. Sometimes I still set an alarm as a reminder on my phone calendar, but I still write it into my planner. Even if it is already in the past.
When the month screen and the day screen are the same size, it affects my ability to register how it all fits together. Months are big and fill two whole pages. Weeks are rows on those pages, and the columns divide each day from the last and the next. I cannot pinch zoom into the day-squares, I just try to make them big enough to fit the important part of anything that needs to be remembered or anticipated for that day.
I think that in some weird way, when I am looking at a calendar app and zoom into a “day-screen” from a “month-screen”, the days that disappear are not real days anymore. Its hard to remember that they exist. This elimination is not a good thing, like Bubba Watson only being able to see the ONE shot that he needs. It is more the opposite, like when the one day eliminates the others, I have no frame into which I can situate afternoon appointments, or my days into my weeks. I have no frames into which I can shape my shots.
I am preparing to leave my current post as a solo pastor in a small-town church (which I have loved and will dearly and deeply miss) to serve as a member of a staff with other ministers at a slightly larger church in a city. As I have anticipated this move, I have found myself saying, “I think that I just need a lane to run in.”
I don’t know exactly what I mean by that, but there is something to that idea. There must be something to how it all fits together for me, and people like me, and for Bubba Watson. Tell me where my limits are so that I can work with what I have, inside of the space I have been given.
I love this quote attributed to Orson Welles.
”The enemy of art is the absence of limitations”
Plenty of people have plenty of opinions about what is proper golf or a proper golf course, that is another conversation.
The fact that so many planners put Sunday on the far right is one reason that I make my own. It is not a religious stance about Sunday being the first day of the week. I think it has to do with the Sunday squares containing more important parts of my work week than most people. So I like to have it over there where I am used to it - on the extreme left side of the page.