About "Sticks and Stoa"
Stoa – An ancient Greek portico usually walled at the back with a front colonnade designed to afford a sheltered promenade.
Sticks – A colloquial term golfers sometimes use to refer to their golf clubs. “Grab your sticks, let’s play a quick nine.”
One of the greatest books ever written is Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor from 161 CE to his death, likely from a plague, in 180 CE. Meditations wasn’t meant to be a widely circulated book. Rather, it was Marcus’s personal journal where he wrote down all of the thoughts and routines and ideas and philosophies that he wanted to live by, day after day. Some of these philosophies he formulated on his own after regular reflection, but it’s clear he was greatly influenced by philosophers from the Stoic school, such as Epictetus. The first Stoic was Zeno, who taught from the Stoa Poikile, or “painted porch” in Athens.
Meditations is a series of entries, some just a sentence or two while others are a long paragraph, all with the intention of reminding himself – the most powerful man in the world at the time – how to think and behave.
"The soul becomes dyed with the color of its thoughts"
“External things are not the problem. It’s your assessment of them. Which you can erase right now.”
“Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.”
Marcus was emperor during a difficult time. Naturally, there were wars to contend with, there were also attempted coups (one by a close friend!), and a plague that went on for decades, so keeping his wits about him was no easy task and something that he made sure to do on a daily basis through reflecting and writing.
Golfers do something similar, reminding themselves of the same things over and over. How we want to behave and how we want to think.
“Keep your head still.”
“Don’t jerk the club back, stay smooth.”
“Fairways and greens, fairways and greens.”
“Keep your composure.”
“Stay in the moment.”
Whether it is dealing with events that shape the history of humankind or playing a casual round after work, humans are, for some reason, prone to losing focus of the fundamentals – fundamentals of the greatest game ever invented or fundamentals of navigating life, either way, we repeatedly lose our focus.
Just as Marcus reminded himself of how to think and behave in his journal, which became Meditations, a golfer might remind themself to “stay in the moment” in the back of their yardage books. Thankfully, none of our yardage books or golf journals will be published for the world to read, but nevertheless, it is a similar thought process.
Sticks and Stoa is a space to – sometimes seriously, sometimes playfully – apply some of the Stoic ideas on life to how to be better golfers. And, maybe, if we pay attention and take some time to think things through, we can take some of those same lessons and apply them elsewhere.
Sticks and Stoa is certainly not the first time someone has considered the fact that golf and life are intertwined. Bobby Jones, one of the greatest golfers of all time and the founder of Augusta National and the Masters tournament once said, "Golf is the closest game to the game we call life. You get bad breaks from good shots; you get good breaks from bad shots – but you have to play the ball where it lies."