Tee it up, lose the ball, blame the wind, and call it a great round anyway.

Golf is a game of precision, patience, and the absolute unshakeable belief that the next shot is going to be the one. It doesn’t matter what happened on the last hole. It doesn’t matter that the ball went somewhere that defies the laws of physics. It doesn’t matter that you told your partner you’d be back by noon and it is now very much not noon. The next shot is going to be perfect and nothing will convince you otherwise.

This is the golfer’s mindset. And it is, genuinely, one of the most optimistic ways to move through the world.

Because golf is hard. Not «this is a little challenging» hard,  but «I have been playing for three years and somehow getting worse» hard. The chipping, the putting, the iron game, the mental game, the part where you watch your ball sail thirty yards over the green in slow motion while your soul quietly leaves your body. All of it requires a level of commitment that most sports simply don’t demand.