One of the funny parts about letting go of your childhood is learning the small lessons you managed to keep.
I don’t know how old I was when my dad first dropped his favorite pearl of wisdom. I don’t remember why he said it. But I can still hear the phrase in my mind, spoken in Dad’s playful intonation, as if to emphasize its inherent truth. I suspect I always will.
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
It took me a while to realize the meaning of those words, and even longer to realize they referred to me. But the answer arrived when I was least expecting it: On a golf course headed in the wrong direction.
I realized my perspective was changing as my rental car tore down the highway somewhere in northern Michigan on the evening after my 28th birthday. The emotion wasn’t quite melancholy or wistfulness — but something deeper: I was confronting the strangeness of aging for the first time.
At twenty-eight, I wasn’t old. More importantly, I didn’t feel old. In fact, I felt precisely the same age as when I’d graduated from college in 2019 — still doe-eyed and green and hungry. But then I looked at the calendar and realized the Syracuse University class of 2025 had just graduated ten years after my arrival on campus. I was as close to the class of 2025 as the class of 2013 was to me … which is to say: I was ancient.
I spent a few minutes in a spiral, grappling with the sinking feeling that I’d fallen behind. I was 28 and young. But my chance to achieve real relevance at a young age, to become the whiz kid I’d always imagined myself becoming, was fleeting. If I blinked, I’d be 30 and washed. And then what? Settle into life as a writer of minimal influence? Become a jilted golf media curmudgeon? Continue to suck at golf? Move to the suburbs? Blech.
It didn’t help that I was in Michigan on a golf trip that was supposed to bring back the glory days. For months, my college buddies had dreamt of this long weekend in Northern Michigan as a long-overdue reunion — a bootstrapped golf trip through god’s country as a convenient excuse to rekindle our friendship. Now, rather than remembering my younger self, I was driving through the woodlands, fearing he was disappearing.
We rose early the next morning. The sun was climbing quickly over Forest Dunes Resort, the latest in a series of unusually cool June days that promised 15 hours of daylight. Within minutes of our arrival, we were teeing off at the course I hoped would be the crown jewel of our trip: The Loop, a reversible Tom Doak design that plays in a different direction each day.
I’d been to The Loop once as my younger self — a wide-eyed 22-year-old subsisting mostly on anxious energy and bravado — and I’d remembered the experience as a gateway drug to golf addiction: mind-bending, perspective-broadening and generally trippy.
We played our first round and the reviews were tepid. Pretty good. Cool. Different. The highest handicaps on our trip appreciated that the fairways at The Loop occasionally cut 200 yards wide (it’d been a difficult weekend on the scorecard); the lowest handicaps enjoyed that things played firm and fast.
But then we returned the following morning to play our second round, and I watched as the golf course came to life. The same mounds that had protected the green now served as backstops, sending off-line approach shots spinning back toward the flagstick. The same bunkers that magnetized a left miss now punished a miss to the right. Often, the best shot was not a towering drive or zippy chip but a bunt with a 4-iron. Everything echoed of everything else, but nothing repeated.
The sun emerged as our round reached its halfway point, and as we waited for the green to clear on a deceptively devilish par-3, we paused for a beer. We sat on the spongy turf, sipping and laughing as we retold the stories of the long weekend. My worries melted.
It wasn’t hard to understand why. The Loop was everything I loved about golf: playful, creative and thought-provoking. It was even better the second time than it was the first — and the goodness only was amplified by the fact that I’d seen it already.
Evidently, my buddies agreed.
“That was totally insane.”
“I didn’t get it yesterday, but I get it now.”
“Okay, that was incredible.”
“The fairways were wider yesterday.”
As the glowing reviews rolled in, I thought of my dad.
If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
The routing, the shot variety, hell — even the method of transportation had changed from our first round to our second — and everything about the experience got better. There was less pressure, more laughter, and even more birdies. The Loop had transformed from a good course to a great one … and all we’d needed to do was walk in the opposite direction.
I wish I could say that The Loop taught me to ease my anxieties about aging — that I learned the best things in life come at the intersection of experience and wisdom. It didn’t.
What I learned at The Loop is that it’s okay not to know, okay if things aren’t the way you thought they’d look.
If you look hard enough for a new perspective, you’ll find one — and maybe that won’t be the only thing that changes.
You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.