Do you believe in the power of PLAY ?
Are you looking to infuse your golf - learning - movement - wellness - educational practice with PLAY ?
This has been the focus of DiscoverGolf for the last 20 years. To bridge , make accessible , and apply “discoveries” from the rich landscape of play - games to physical education settings ( from the driving range to pop up DG events ).
DG is “about” many things ( some of which is discussed here ). You might say that DG is about one thing above all ; the aesthetic experience. If games ( and their PLAY ) are art —- > and learning, exploring, becoming are simply varied forms of PLAY ——- > then our goal is to create the requisite beauty that creates this realm.
We believe this to be the crucial paradigm shift; to implore our students to see their outputs as EXPRESSION rather than FUNCTION, to see CONNECTION > “behavior” , to see the human being as a node within a system of personal and impersonal forces that create play - art - aesthetic experience.
Why does this matter ? It changes how we approach learning.
10,000 hours of “deliberate practice” leaves no room for the awe of the golf club as paint brush that has become our “ third arm”. The club as connection point between social - emotional - material space is now a vehicle for what might be , the all important - immediate - possible.
And why does this matter ? How many golfers - movers - athletes begrudgingly go through the paces and measures of DELIBERACY only to create a cold, “ rationalized” picture of “efficiency” ?
How many of these humans - turned automatons find themselves lathargically counting reps and sets in the gym, glancing back and forth from YouTube wondering - anticipating the ways they are doing it wrong and what they they need to do.
“The opposite of PLAY is not WORK, it is depression.”
This is the story that nobody wants to tell; but WE DO.
We don’t want to create metrics of “improvement” only to validate a method that can only be legitimized by a number. There is no number. You cannot quantity the swirl of forces - connection points - potencies of a human body within an assemblage of other human bodies.
DiscoverGolf is about wellness , but not in a California juice cleanse kind of way. But rather in a way that shapes the “lusory attitude” ; the gameful mind. A disposition melded from BOTH the whims and wishes of make believe play all the way through the crucible of struggle, the pain - love of competition.
A celebration of seeing that crack in the sidewalk as a game “step on a crack break your .. “ rather than yet another division - another duality - another logic chop - another segment - another measure.
When THIS is the goal; the golf , the tennis, the movement practice may or may not “get better” in an immediately measurable way. But thats ok, because there is no better, there is no hierarchy, there is only right now - the embodied potential of this moment. The next minute, hour, year, lifetime can and will be different now. This moment, like the tail of a comet, will carry itself into the future.
Whether this play - as - default setting collapses into a golf - movement - architecture - law - economic - familial ( or ALL of the above ) setting is what matters. What matters is that each and every one of our expressions is a playful one, done for its own sake, constantly striving to overcome itself- go beyond itself.
This is the vision of DG. To invent the future. Rather than simply pointing at things, identities, manipulatable data points we want to create environments of the new. Humans that develop in these kinds of play- rich environments understand that understanding is outside their neuronal firings; that true thinking, is found in movement - building - emotion, because its creates difference - a newness that captivates us all and stirs innovation.
If these words move you , then we would love to talk.