What to Do When You Find Yourself Swimming in Life’s Water Hazard

Golf is a stupid game.  It’s frustrating, it’s unforgiving, it very rarely goes the way you want it to, and it confirms – over and over again – every negative belief you have in your worth as a human being. 

In other words, it’s a lot like life. 

Only an idiot would inflict that sort of pain on himself.  But you will see herds of us out on the golf course every day, shanking and stubbing and slicing and swearing and generally losing the will to live. 

However, every once in a while, the planets align and the golf gods smile upon you and you drain a birdie.  Just one is enough to keep a poor delusional golfer coming back for an entire season.  If, by some miracle, you hit a hole-in-one, your spouse may never see you again.

Some people are better at golf, just as some people are better at life.  They sail along, hitting par after par, and sinking the odd birdie for good measure.  They can go to hell.   

The vast majority of us are hacking our way through life with the grace and skill of a frightened hippo.  We’re on the last hole of an inconsistent front nine, and just hit the ball into the water hazard with our fairway wood, which will soon follow the ball into the water hazard.  We need the tiniest glimmer of hope that our current excruciating situation will improve.  And a new three-wood. 

I have a couple friends who can tolerate my play and behaviour on the golf course, both of which might be described as “erratic”.  So I play with them regularly.  We have created our own rules, and you would probably not recognize the game we play as “golf”.  We have a saying, my small but determined group of delusional hackers.

 It has become our mantra, on the course and off.  For my money, it would make a brilliant motivational poster.  At least as good as this one:

We’re not sure which one of us it actually originated with.  It’s like it organically inserted itself into our game, in our greatest moment of need.  One or more of us were having an epically terrible round, and angst was in the air. 

Then someone said, “There’s always the back nine!”

And, almost magically, we were filled with hope.  We were also filled with beer, so we were primed for a mood swing, but those words were definitely the trigger.  Suddenly we realized we could put this tragedy behind us, and carry on to the unexplored territory of the back nine, where any number of joys and wonders might await.  Potentially, if not likely, pars and birdies would fill our scorecards.  We certainly wouldn’t know until we got there. 

Over time, we discovered that this magical phrase applied to more than golf.  Every ugly situation had a back nine.  Every person had a back nine.  Even countries have a back nine.  Look at Germany.  They had a catastrophic front nine.  Now they’re arguably the most influential and respected nation in the European Union.

If your front nine has gone well, and you’ve been driving it right up the middle of the fairway every time, you have every reason to expect your back nine will be just as much fun, and you’ll go skipping up to the tenth tee filled with confidence.  In my case, the front nine ended badly.  My lengthy career in broadcasting unexpectedly swerved into oncoming traffic.  The resulting collision left me in emotional traction for months.  My motivation was on a heart-lung machine.  My confidence had a compound fracture.

It was, in golf terms, roughly equivalent to driving your cart over a landmine. 

I spent the next two years trying to find the back nine.  Then I stumbled out of the woods, bedraggled and beaten down, and there it was. 

PoopTime was the back nine of my life.  Well, the first hole anyway.  Intended as a pleasant way to pass the time while you’re making an underwater toilet sculpture, it seemed like the perfect venue for my writing, which is generally the right length to read during an average bathroom visit, and frequently relies heavily on fart jokes.  I reached out to the owner, she invited me to contribute a piece about fish farts, she quite liked it, and before you knew it, I was the content manager for Pooptime.

I was on the green in regulation, with a tap-in for birdie. 

Naturally, it turned out to be a gag ball that exploded on impact.  Our whirlwind online affair ended as quickly as it had begun.  I was only content manager for the better part of one morning before she came to her senses.  Then, my writing was deemed unreadable by whatever ruthless and robotic editing software she was using.  Of course, software doesn’t poop, which rendered its opinion meaningless, but you can’t argue with it.  You can swear at it, though. 

Still, even though I had proven incapable of writing for an artificial audience, I had gotten a positive response from actual humans, which is, I believe, who you should be writing for.  Otherwise, everything you write becomes mechanical and formulaic, devoid of personality.  There should be some rough edges, the odd sentence fragment, and, on occasion, more than two paragraphs strung together without a subheading. 

Because Most People Can Maintain Their Attention Span Longer Than That or Books Wouldn’t Be a Thing

I had failed to sink the birdie putt, but I was sufficiently emboldened by the experience to continue on my own, bypassing the ironclad rules set forth by our emotionless, rigidly programmed grammar overlords.  I fired up my own business, and rented some space in the internet’s version of tenement housing, where I could publish anything I damn well wanted.  It’s a bold experiment; time will tell if it was a good idea or not.  The great thing is, it doesn’t matter.  I’m back in the game, and if there’s anything I’ve learned from golf, it’s that the game is a lot more fun when you play by your own rules.  You can define success any way you want. 

The important thing is to keep playing through adversity, because the alternative is … not playing.  And these days, it seems, way too many people are walking off the course with lots of holes left to play.    

In life, as in golf, there are times when everything you do and everything you touch turns to crap. You might as well be trying to make contact with that tiny ball of happiness by swinging a marlin with your eyes closed.   Just remember, no matter how awful and bleak the moment might be, there’s always a future with limitless possibilities.  No guarantees, of course, but every chance your game will improve.  And the worse it looks, the better those chances are.  Especially when you make your own rules.   

So the next time you’re up to your eyeballs in screaming toddlers, or dubious expense reports, or a golf cart fire, say those magic words.  Embrace the unknown future and its boundless potential.  Because the present, sometimes, can suck it.  

There’s always a back nine.