The first flow came in the whoosh of golf. Golf is a game I had learned from my father, who played it on Saturdays with his neighborhood buddies. He would have loved for me to take it up, but golf was a bit too slow for an adolescent, and who wants to hang out with their father, anyway? Still, I acquired a basic understanding and figured I’d get serious about golf someday, like when I retired. That day finally happened when I lost my teaching job last June.
As it happens, my friend Laura has been in the throes of a golf obsession during the past year. She started to take workshops and lessons at the McGinnis Park course in Marin, inviting me along. Over the summer, I became hooked, too. I am a pretty serious person (duh!), and I quickly realized that for me, one important key to golf was intention: where do I want my ball to land? “Intention” felt extraordinarily powerful to me, so I decided to choose it as my “word” for 2023.
Meanwhile, a second current spurted from writing, or more accurately, in having something published. During the summer of 2021, sandwiched between teaching an Immersive and teaching Bio2, I began to explore the origin of a movie made at Stanford med school. It was a crazy cult film, produced in 1971, using choreography to illustrate protein synthesis, set to the beat of the psychedelic “Protein Jive Sutra”, and staidly narrated by Paul Berg. I had first seen the movie in grad school and later showed it to my students, coincidentally within a few days of its semi-centennial. I had often wondered how this kooky “molecular happening" came to be, and over the summer I managed to discover the surviving participants, to interview them, and to produce a manuscript, which languished on my computer for more than a year.
With the onslaught of atmospheric rivers in December of 2022, golf ended (as did my ceramics class at College of Marin). With nothing better to do, since I was no longer teaching, I dusted off my document and sent it to Stanford Medicine magazine. And they bought it. Literally!
Here, at last, is the merger of the two tributaries that flowed into my pool of 2023 resolve: the intention to keep my eye on the ball, as it were, specifically, to return to writing and to try to publish some of my work. Once I made that decision, I felt yet another surge of inspiration from "savoring the good". I decided to write a memoir about my year of teaching high school, to bask in the joy I felt for the subject and the students. How I will manage to merge science and story remains to be seen!
Anais Nin said, “To write is to taste life twice,” and that is exactly what I intend to do.
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