A is for - Acceleration

When, in 2022, the title ‘Flirting with Wisdom’ dropped, fully formed, into my head, I was walking the dog.

The golf course is perfect for both enjoying a walk and wearing the dog out. Yet suddenly an idea was intruding on my relaxation, demanding to be written.

I could immediately see three issues with it:

1. ‘Flirting with wisdom’ seemed to reflect, with disconcerting accuracy, my approach to the subject - so why couldn’t the title have gone and found someone who claimed to be wise, or had at least properly studied wisdom?
2. The title was too good not to act on, but it was going to get in the way of many other things I had been hoping to do in the future.
3. I knew in my bones that writing it had the potential to be deeply uncomfortable.

Struggling with these thoughts, I had to wait for a group of golfers to tee off. As usual, their shots were depressingly badly timed.

A golf swing is a complex beast, but it boils down to one key element – and bear with me while I explain it; there is a point.

A golf swing is a complex beast, but it boils down to one key element – the moment of momentum.

Put simply, from the time the golf club-head strikes the ball, until the moment the ball leaves it again, the club must be moving in a straight line, and, most crucially, it must be accelerating. The acceleration forces the ball against the club-head, so that it stays pressed up against metal for as long as possible, gaining momentum with every microsecond of contact.

If you have ever been in a really powerful car, think of how you get forced back against the seat as it accelerates away. Get this acceleration right in your golf swing and the ball will carve a whistling path through the air after it leaves the club.

Get it wrong – i.e. decelerate too early – and the ball will amble off in a desultory manner, acting for all the world as though it objects to having its plans altered and is going to do the barest minimum for you by way of revenge.

I only learned about the importance of well-timed acceleration years after it might have been useful to my own golf, or to any other ball sport that I had played in my youth – since the same rules apply to them if you want power and timing combined.

But, in that moment on the golf course, I had one of those flashes that happen when you realize something has more to it than you originally thought. Well-timed acceleration, I realized, was the perfect metaphor for what I needed at that moment.

Well-timed acceleration, I realized, was the perfect metaphor for what I needed at that moment.

We were coming out of a pandemic. Our family had experienced its most traumatic twelve-month period ever – death, cancer etc etc. I was feeling battered.

With so much change, the thought of any more made me want to run far, far away. In other words, I had become that badly timed golf ball. Here, instead, was an idea demanding that I get my timing in order and accelerate.

Not that acceleration is a recipe for every possible situation, but I realized that in my better moments I had instinctively known when a situation demanded it.

In teaching, for example, as you walk into a classroom you have to accelerate – to up the energy. The most boring teaching is done by people who have done masses of worthy preparation, but then think they can sit back and rely on it.

This lack of attention to the moment of momentum is why so many golfers also get it wrong – they focus on the preparation to the moment of contact (their backswing and downswing) but start cruising by the time they actually hit the ball.

This is not to say that preparation is not important, but acing the acceleration, the movement, the momentum, is much more crucial.

And there, on the golf course, I realized that much of what I have discovered for myself over the years had come in flashes like this one – when something particular triggered a bigger learning.

I hadn’t been looking for these moments, but somehow, bit by bit, I had accumulated metaphors and approaches that helped me better understand the world.

It may be a stretch to class these as wisdom, but it still seemed like it might be worth pulling them together and seeing whether anything of use to others might come out of the exercise. Might it turn into a web series? Perhaps? Might it turn into a book? Maybe? Might it become a publishable book? Who knew!

But I would never find out if I didn’t accelerate at that moment.