After my last post I went to the bookshelf and pulled down Zen Golf by Joseph Parent to see if he had any comments relevant to the subject. As you would expect, a large part of the book is devoted to the issue of staying in the present. Zen means “action with awareness”, according to Parent.

So if you stay in the moment, I guess you can play with the Stooges and Buddha simultaneously. The trick is stepping into your golf at the moment you need to as you begin to size up your shot, enter your routine, etc. And stay with the Stooges, enjoying the fun, as you drift along the course between shots.

Easy to say, but if good golf is played in a state “free of tension and chatter … concentrated on one thing”, as Parent notes that Harvey Penick said, it can be hard to stay in that state when Stoogeball is full of chatter (fun chatter, mind you) and your concentration is sliding back and forth between the fun and your next shot.

I’ll give it a try in my skins game today. Skins encourages staying in the moment, with each hole its own tournament, and I’m expecting a good crowd of stooges. I’ll just try to slice cut divide the time into smaller increments and see if Buddha will hang around as I swing, even if he isn’t riding in the cart with me.