Thanks for the lesson, son!

My 6 year old son Siddharth has been learning golf for about a year. He has been on the course a few times with his coach, but most of his golf sessions are lessons at the Poona Club practice facility. I went out to play a few holes with Siddharth a few days ago. This was my first golf round with him.

Siddharth is big for his age - a tall child with a big face and large chubby cheeks. He plays the violin, plays tennis, and golfs (among other things). However, his defining characteristic is that he suffers from extreme curiosity - I make it sound like a medical condition for a good reason. In my lifetime I have not seen another person with the level of curiousity Siddharth has. He notices things no one else around him does, and he drops everthing else to go check out anything that seems interesting. We have many funny stories around this, but that will probably be a different blog post.

During our 1.5 hour, 4 hole-round, Siddharth took several detours to check out butterflies, poke his 6-iron at tree trunks, retrieve a ball from a pond, and so on. He would hit a shot, and then just take off across the fairway to check out the next interesting thing on the golf course. At first I was at my wits' end to get him to play faster since we were holding up the groups behind us. After a while, I just asked those groups to go ahead of us, and started enjoying what Siddharth was doing. Retrieving Siddharth's ball from the water body on hole#6 was so much fun!

At the end of our adventure, I asked him what he enjoyed the most during the round? Retrieving the ball from the pond - pat came the reply.

At some stage of our lives, many of us have been told by others to stop obsessing about our goals and enjoy the journey. The 4-hole golf round with Siddharth was an incredibly forceful demonstration of just that. Thanks Siddharth!