What happens when you just ‘live in the moment’?
[Estimated reading time: 3 minutes, 54 seconds.]
If you'd like to follow along on our trip, you can follow on Instagram or on the personal blog.
When I moved to Seattle, I didn’t golf at all. I had never picked up a club. The hubs (although he was the boyfriend at the time) was very much into golf, so I figured ‘new city, new interests’. I then hired a friend of his to give me golf lessons.
[Pro tip: You never want to get golf lessons from anyone you are dating or married to. It is not relationship enhancing for either person. Trust me on this. Fortunately, the hubs and I knew this early on.]
Anyhoo….
We started golfing regularly for a few years. This included the hubs proposing to me on a beach near a gorgeous golf course in the Pacific Northwest. It is ridiculously hard to get to (or so I thought until this week) and is world renown.
Eventually we stopped golfing regularly because:
If you know anything about golf, technique is everything and the slightest tweak can have massive improvements or create a disaster. I never experienced any activity where it was so mentally focused. I had an unrealistic standard for myself in terms of what I should be able to score.
It took too much time to play a round. If you golf at non-private courses, you know how slow it is to play 18 holes (and most courses do not have viable 9 hole options). I just didn’t love the game enough to dedicate 6+ hours every weekend to play when I didn’t get a real workout out of it.
One time we went away for a weekend with close friends to golf and taste wine. Our friends were hitting shots that were amazing. I then had my ‘a-ha!’ moment around the fact that they just loved the game and loved improving their game. That’s why they were able to make those shots.
[See what I did there with ‘a-ha!’ and being in Norway.]
It struck me in that moment that I had zero business having such high expectations because I was ‘meh’ about golf as a whole. Comparing myself to our friends was not smart.
The upside is that eureka moment led me to take myself less seriously playing golf going forward and have fun when we did play. That was maybe once a year and I was good with that. And if the hubs wanted to golf, I told him to have fun.
Fast forward to planning this trip. I had read somewhere about playing golf at midnight due to the ‘white nights’ here on the Lofoten Islands. I looked into it and thought, “cool”. It’s in the middle of nowhere on an archipelago that takes quite the effort to get to!
The hubs was skeptical as his interest in golf has waned over the years. But I said “come on, when will we ever be able to do something like this again? If the weather sucks or we’re tired, we’ll stop.”
I booked a tee time at 830pm, which would have us finish just after midnight. This is referred to as a midnight sun. We had an early dinner and made our way to the golf course because everything is a decent drive away on the islands.
Somehow the weather gods aligned and we had perfect weather. The sky was captivating with the sun setting a little bit because right now, the sun doesn’t completely set due to the time of the year in the Arctic Circle.
And to put a cherry on top, I actually swung the club pretty well. I had a couple of 200+ yard drives and a few in the 150+ yard range. These yardages off of the tee have never been a thing for me. Also this course did not have holes close together so we pushed our clubs while walking 9 hilly miles.
This course is beautiful and very rugged! Yes, those are stairs with a makeshift ramp for the pull carts!
Side note: Maybe all of that strength training is working?! Who knew?
The sky was beautiful and all the hubs and I could do was just laugh and smile at what was unfolding in front of us. Perfect temps and no wind on a golf course at 68 degrees parallel north latitude.
Bringing it back to ‘living in the moment’. I hadn’t picked up a golf club since late 2019 before golfing on Thursday evening. I didn’t care. I just thought it would be cool to be golfing at midnight while the sun was out.
It ended up being one of the most magical experiences of our time together. We just went with it with no expectations other than hoping for great weather. And it was incredible. We couldn't have predicted this scene.
Taken at midnight. No filter.
We got lucky but we were also in a position to do something like this because we know these are the activities that we want to keep doing for as long as possible.
Whether that is doing something consistently like hiking.
Or something that is more like a “one off” such as golfing at midnight.
I’m on Day 16 of the “marathon” I have been training for.
Do you know what your marathon is?
Need help figuring it out?
I can absolutely help. Get in touch.