meghanmaclaren

I might have taken board games too seriously when I was a kid. Remember snakes and ladders? You could take hours and hours to get to that top line of the board, just a few squares away from the victorious one, sensing the finish line. Potentially one move away. Thinking all the hard work was done. All that forwards and backwards, climbing and falling, and here you were. You were on the right level. You were there.

But there was always the longest snake of all right before the last square, one that would take your precious, hopeful counter all the way back to somewhere near the beginning of the board. All the way back…

I think the people who created that game deserve some credit for life lessons.

I could compare so many things to that board game scenario. Every round, every tournament, every year, every golfing or sporting or professional career pretty much has their own versions of that. I’ve had more than one tournament this year where I’ve finished high up the leaderboard, but I was one shot or decision away, on the very last hole, from winning. There are plenty of positives in that of course, but as professionals in an individual sport we are all selfish and (at least I think) we are all in it to come home with the trophy. That’s what sport is, when it comes down to it. Second place is first loser etc etc. The brutal thing about golf is you put so much energy and effort in for so long and one tiny thing at the end of hours and hours is what brings about ‘loss’. In time – and the recovery time is thankfully getting shorter for me – you recognise the good that you did and can be proud about it, and more importantly learn from it, but… you’re still left with an incredibly bitter taste in your mouth for a while. Like getting to the penultimate square and just as you get ready to step over the line you come crashing back down. (I’m not sure I felt quite as strongly about losing in snakes and ladders, but hopefully you see the point).

US Open was kind of like that to the absolute extreme. I know people want to know what happened, why I didn’t perform, if I was that much out of my depth and so on… but I had good performances before then and I’ve had good performances since then, just as I’ve had and will have bad. What I will say is I’ve learnt more in the last month than I would have believed possible, and as long as that keeps happening then I know I can keep progressing. And the flip side of disappointments like that is you have to get into that position to have them. Getting to the top level of whatever your board game is means you’ve climbed and plotted and battled our way up there. Every person that I’m lucky enough to say supports me will make sure I don’t forget that. Disappointments are one thing, but the context of your disappointments will tell you a few things too.

There’s something about being pulled backwards to go forwards again. Look at what Koepka did… he won the US Open and suddenly people remembered that he was playing on the Challenge Tour a few years ago. Look at Jordan Smith winning the Order of Merit on EuroPro, then Challenge Tour, and now an event on the European Tour. I think people are starting to acknowledge that bursting onto a major stage as a young prodigy isn’t the only (or even the best) recipe for superstar-dom. Taking paths like that can be tough when you watch a Spieth or Lexi Thompson winning majors at the age they are. And I know I would say this with where I am career wise, but feel like you can learn possibly even more by getting yourself cut a few times on your way up. Maybe that way, you’ll be sharper when you do get there. Call it grit, resilience, character… call it nothing at all if you want. But I’m pretty sure I’ve got more of it from the past 12 months than I would have if I’d had things all go the way I wanted them to. And I’m also pretty sure that’s a good thing.

I don’t drink alcohol very often for a few different reasons. The biggest one of those is I don’t like wasting my time – I have things I want to achieve, and every day spent not working towards them is a chance I’m giving up. But another reason I don’t drink very often, as anyone who has ever been out with me will confirm, is that I like to disappear. (And I’m very very good at it… you can see how that could cause potential problems).

But even if my mind has absolutely no sense of consequences on those nights, I kind of understand the fragmented logic it is attempting to follow. It can be suffocating spending too much of your time fixed in certain behaviour, or trapped in the same social circles, or forcing conversations you don’t care about, or curbing your jokes because people don’t get your sense of humour. Clearly alcohol for me is the switch where I just walk away from those situations (and away, and away, and away… I’d love to know what drink made me think walking twenty miles alone through downtown Miami was ever going to work).

In a similar kind of way, some of my most enjoyable nights out were when I either didn’t feel the need to wander off or I could quite happily drift from group of people to group of people. Every person and every place has something a little bit different about them and it’s not always what it appears to be. Everyone has pieces of their personality that don’t quite belong with the company they keep or the town they live in. Those under the surface parts of people are the parts I like discovering. And I think quite often we want to share them, we just don’t always know how to. We all get trapped by whatever boundaries we think frame the life we’re supposed to live; the conversations we’re supposed to have and the opinions we’re supposed to agree with. But it’s suffocating, and I think it’s ok to need a step back from that.

I think where I’m trying to go with this is that it’s ok to not feel comfortable. It’s ok to drift… whether it be from people, or places, or yourself. How anyone can know where they want to live “when they grow up” is beyond me. It can take time to find the people or the places that bring out all of the best versions of yourself.. it can take time and maturity to realise you don’t have to do what everyone else is doing (and you can figure that out without the influence of alcohol). You can care what people think of you, but only if those people are people you respect. Finding them is worth it… everyone else is probably too busy worrying about themselves to care anyway.

If you could have everything you could possibly dream of, in terms of practice facilities/training equipment/coaching expertise/weather… do you think it would automatically lead to improvement?

It’s the idea of the grass always being greener on the other side. But when you get there, is it really? It’s greener where you water it…

I’ve had this blog lingering in my mind for a while without getting round to writing it. For one thing, I couldn’t think of a title for it. And then when I was in Arizona for a few days, I was lucky enough to stay in a place called Paradise Valley… ever think some things in life are more than just coincidence?

While I was at home in January and February, I got into the habit (for the most part) of getting up around 6. I knew it was cold and dark outside but once you’ve adjusted your mindset to accept that, you just get on with it. If you want the results, you put the work in… because if you don’t, someone else will. But when I was in Florida the last few weeks (and Paradise Valley), I found it harder to have that discipline. Most of the time I was out there it was between 20 and 30 degrees, and then there were a couple of days it dropped to 10… and suddenly my brain was telling me that was too cold to spend a full day practicing in. Yet 10 degrees in England is close to shorts weather. 10 degrees in Sweden will have you not able to get on the golf course because there are too many people out. It’s not always about your circumstances; it’s about your perception of those circumstances.

Something about poorer facilities or poorer conditions can create an added internal motivation, I think. It makes you get more out of your time, because otherwise why are you doing it? You’re not going to intentionally spend hours outside in freezing temperatures if you’re not doing something that can show measurable improvement. But that mindset can be harder to achieve when you’re somewhere more comfortable. Getting out to practice might be easy, but that is far from the only thing that counts.

Of course, having access to better facilities can make things easier. It’s why I spent the last month in the US. If someone has an area where they can hit shots from 40-100 yards to a good quality green, chances are they will be a better pitcher than someone who doesn’t have an area like that. Trying to build your confidence by holing hundreds of 3 footers is probably not going to go well if you’re on a hollotined bumpy surface running 7 on the stimp. But facilities and conditions aren’t everything. The more you’re challenged in practice, the more opportunities you have to learn. Being able to hit a perfectly flighted 7 iron from a perfectly flat lie on a perfectly manicured fairway is one thing, but being able to hold up that same 7 iron in a right to left wind when the ball is above your feet, that lands in the middle of the green and leaves you a 15 footer for birdie to the pin tucked away on the right hand side…. that’s another thing altogether. More people can do the first than the second. It’s not about where you practice, it’s about how you practice.

I think there’s a danger in having things readily available. It can lessen our drive to find improvements for ourselves, to challenge ourselves, to make ourselves uncomfortable. There was a discussion about this in a book called ‘The Gold Mine Effect’, and how it was reflected in Chelsea FC’s academy – the equivalent of a 5* hotel, yet failing to produce success. It was contrasted to the training methods of one of the world’s best sprint coaches, who refuses to invest in any high tech equipment or training facilities, choosing instead to separate the best by figuring out who’s willing to sacrifice the most for success. I’m sure there have been loads of studies and actual research done, but whatever that might show, I know it’s something I’ve noticed lately. Getting too comfortable can make you lose your edge.

Being somewhere like Paradise Valley sounds like the end goal. But once you get there, can you remember what the real end goal is? And what you have to do to get there?

I think I have a character flaw in that I seem to spend a portion of every plane journey lost somewhere deep in my phone’s camera roll. It wasn’t particularly intentional this time; I was looking for some inspirational quote (I have far too many saved) to set as my background. But I still ended up as I often do; pausing on screenshotted messages from someone who used to mean a lot, or smiling at the alcohol fuelled happiness that only the people in the pictures would understand, or admiring the views from some of the places I’ve been to.

I think it leans more towards nostalgia than emotion as we mature, but the last few years have definitely made me conscious of that ‘nothing lasts forever’ aspect to life. I don’t mean that to sound cynical, but I think it’s a reminder to appreciate what we have while we have it.

When I wrote that sentence, I had a nagging feeling I’d written something similar before… and I found it in the blog I wrote not long after the Curtis Cup:

“I’m not sure whether it’s cynicism or maturity to know that nothing last forever.”

It’s funny I guess how different circumstances can lead us to the same questions or conclusions. When I want to find a quote relevant to my current mood, I know I’ll find one back in my camera roll because I know I go through the same cycles. Circumstances change, but it’s interesting how often we come full circle.

But where the first blog was more about not being scared to chase adrenaline, this is somewhere between appreciation and letting go… and understanding that everyone has to experience that.

I could write a blog (or probably a book) about college, and letting go of that life, and I think there would be a lot of college graduates that resonate. But I think the quicker you become aware that things don’t last, the quicker you can appreciate them.

My last few months at uni I started walking slower and slower around campus. I’m never going to be a ‘name the birds and the trees and the flowers’ kind of person, but I did kind of wake up to my surroundings. The fact I could throw on a t-shirt and gym shorts, walk a couple of minutes in the early morning warmth to Starbucks, and just sit outside drinking my iced latte… it’s the simplest of things you miss. There can be more stress than I can explain with being a student-athlete, but in one sense you’re able to put the gritty struggles of ‘real life’ on hold.

I don’t pretend to have all this stuff figured out. I let myself feel things more deeply than I probably should and as much as I try to have good intentions, there are always things that we could have done differently. Sometimes two people can look at the same situation completely differently and both end up hurt. Sometimes people make promises they can’t keep; sometimes people change who you didn’t think ever would.

But it’s that bittersweet appreciation I’m trying to get at. Being aware that the way your life is, isn’t the way it’s always going to be. Some relationships might last for a long time. You might be in the same job for a long time. You might live in the same house for a long time. But as much as each phase of your life feels like your whole life, it’s just a part. You don’t necessarily have to close the book once the chapter is done (I guess the fact I spend plane journeys looking through my camera roll shows that I maybe should close the book sometimes); but there is always so much more than one chapter.

“Don’t live the same year 80 times and call it a life”.

Circumstances change, people move on. You’re allowed to do the same. Just make sure you recognise the good in those circumstances, and those people, while they are there.

My posts are usually golf related.. this one not so much.

There may well be people who will say golf is all I should write about, (if I have to write at all) and there will be more people who don’t really care at all. Stick to what you know, leave other people’s problems to other people, don’t upset anyone etc etc. In particular, leave politics to the politicians.

But the things going on in the world right now aren’t simply politics. This isn’t just America and one president, or the UK and one vote, or people millions of miles away who are never going to impact our lives anyway. To me at least – and judging by the ongoing protests as I’m writing this – this is real. This is about values.. compassion and empathy and humanity. And, running dangerously quietly in the background, truth. A single blog post, least of all mine, is never going to change the world, but there’s a difference between talking about values and actually living them. Maybe in another life I would be standing on the streets of New York, or volunteering in European refugee camps, or writing directly to politicians with the power to change things. Maybe that’s what someone braver would do. But writing this is better than nothing. Those values are the things I believe in, and if I’m going to write about things important to me, I would be a hypocrite to not write about this.

The last thing I want to do is preach, and I’m not going to change my opinion of people for choosing not to get involved in things they don’t think they can change. But you don’t have to go and march in the streets with a placard to embody your values. You make choices every single day that do that.. but being aware of what those choices are is incredibly important. Choosing to question whether the information being presented to you is what it says it is. Quietly, arguments are presented and ‘evidence’ given to validate bigger decisions that are made. And quietly, those arguments and evidence don’t always hold up.

The US travel ban has been enacted to “keep America safe”, but none of the perpetrators of deadly terrorist attacks in the US since 9/11 have come from any of the seven countries now barred from entry.

Syrian refugees have been banned indefinitely from entering the US.

Steve Jobs’ father was a Syrian refugee.

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, everyone has their own shadings of right and wrong.. but the information that those shadings are built on needs to be accurate. “Staying out of it” and leaving politics to the politicians, assumes accuracy without questioning it. And right now, things need to be questioned more than ever. Part of the reason I don’t talk about politics too much is because I know there’s a huge amount of stuff I don’t know. But I know the values I try to live by, and I know when something doesn’t fit in with them.

This might not have anything to do with golf, but there are values inherent in sport that are important here too. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from.. it matters what you choose to do.