Month: November 2011

Today is my last day as a so-called free man. If being unemployed for the last few months can really qualify as real freedom. Bumming around and trying to find goals day by day is not my favorite activity.

Tomorrow I get to join the ranks again of those fine upstanding working folks out there. Get up bright and early, learn more stuff and meet new colleagues, and have some purpose in life again. Renewed and invigorated, you're never too old for that.

Having so much time leftover has certainly improved my golf game immensely at least. Looking through my records for this year, not counting all the match plays, I've managed to play more than ninety rounds, with an average score of 81.4. My highest score was a lousy 92 and my lowest score was an inspiring 71, which I had twice.

However, playing good golf isn't everything, and it certainly doesn't pay the bills. Back to the real world for me. I wonder how much my golfing skills will suffer, I hope not much.

With more money in the bank, I can buy new clubs and other golfing paraphernalia, which in theory might help improve my game. I will drive to work and my golf clubs will travel with me everywhere. Who knows when an unexpected golfing opportunity might arise while I'm on the road.

This afternoon I look out of my upstairs window, and I am confronted by a mysterious formation of clouds with purple lining dashed against a dark blue sky.

What is nature trying to tell us?

One's first impression might be that this is an ominous foreboding of a cruel winter to come, as this has been predicted in the papers during the last week. Supposedly this time around the winter will be a severely cold and challenging climate.

I prefer to remain positive and consider this awesome window view as a friendly farewell from nature. Let's acknowledge her kind gesture of thanks, there she is urging us to look forward to the return of next years sunny and warm climate.

Just hang in there is all.

I try to make it a point everyday to have my daily run. The total length is 7.7 kilometers, and depending on my mood and how fit I feel, the route takes me about forty minutes to cover.

Now that I have so much free time left over, I fill my days with golf in the morning and running in the afternoon. As of today, I have run eleven days in a row, which means that I've covered 84.7 kilometers. Supposing that I had done that in one stretch, it would have taken me all the way to Amsterdam and almost back again.

The route takes me through the wonderful flat countryside, in the middle of nowhere, along lots of water and past farmland. The last leg does take me along the highway, but the amazing view on the right makes it much nicer. If the sky is clear blue, I see the giant orange ball of the sun setting in the distance.

Each day closer to winter brings the sun lower and lower as the orange sliver gets thinner and thinner. When the new year returns, the orange sliver widens in glimmering beauty, welcoming my return and the return of the approaching warmer weather. But that will take some time, and now I will have to bear with it getting colder and the waterways freezing over first.

Google maps

Starting next month I'll be working again, in Amsterdam coincidentally. That means that there will be much less time for running, let alone for golf. I will have to figure something out if I want to keep my youthful figure and my single digit handicap.

Playing golf on a foggy day makes the sport very challenging if not outright impossible. At least starting from the tee box you can estimate the hole direction fairly accurately. Just orient your stance perpendicular to the tee markers and fire away.

Once you get out on the fairway however, things get much more difficult. There's a hidden six sense of golf that tells you about where to hit the next shot, being it either an approach shot to the green or a longish fairway shot. The fog messes things up by creating a thick whitish curtain through which you must hit the ball, thereby introducing significant error.

Can you see where the flag is?

Not only is the exact direction to the hole hard to figure out, but the distance as well. The fog creates this weird kind of optical illusion where it's very difficult to measure how far the shot should go. Perhaps the visual senses create havoc in your mind, a kind of panic situation, where your thinking gets much more muddled up than it should.

The best strategy is just not to think too much about the less than ideal situation and just stand up to the ball and give it your best. Also, you need to accept the fact that if you miss the target, it was not just caused by mishitting but by that irksome fog as well.

I guess you have to be pretty addicted to the sport of golf in order to want to play in such an annoying climate, but it's still great fun. That once in a lifetime shot that lands right next to the flag becomes even more miraculous.

Normally when I'm having my daily run along those flat and endless meadows which are so typical of the Dutch countryside, I don't think about that much. My brain is on auto-pilot and most of my thoughts either lull just beneath the surface of my consciousness or even disappear altogether.

This afternoon was a little different, though. I kept on thinking about this animated video I'd seen earlier that day. It was called The Divided Brain, and it was packed full of these amazing ideas which struck me.

In particular, there was this one repeating theme about how we need to be more passionate about the right hemisphere and the need to return what that knows to a broader context, which kept roaming around inside of my head.

These were the final words of that video which upon first hearing it rung so very true and then kept on going around and around in my head:

"The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We've created a society that honors the servant but has forgotten the gift."

Over and over again, and then I was back home huffing and puffing at the back door.