On the Sweet Spot: Stalking the Effortless Present - Hardcover

Richard Keefe, recognized globally as an expert in neurocognition, is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and psychology at Duke University Medical Center and adjunct professor at the Duke-University of Singapore Graduate Medical School. His work for the past twenty years has focused on applying innovative strategies in neuroscience to measure human cognition.

Chapter One: Spontaneous Generation

I did not really trust the orthopedist who was about to operate on my knee. Maybe that was why I wanted to stay awake during the surgery. A friend of mine who was an M.D. told me it was safer not to have general anesthesia, and I was nervous about the surgery, even though it was minor. I don't really remember why I was afraid. Perhaps it was because I was thirty-two at the time, and my life felt so empty. I had just finished graduate school in clinical psychology a year before, and was having trouble finding much inspiration in my new position as a faculty member in a psychiatry department. Each day of research on the causes of schizophrenia seemed to be fraught with interpersonal battles disguised as politics disguised as scientific inquiry. My personal life had no future either: I was dating a young woman who had just finished college and lived with her mother. I was on the cusp of middle age, and she was dyeing her hair a new color each month and wondering what it would be like to have a job. I guess being with her helped me ignore the fact that time was racing along, and I was stuck by the side of the road with a flat tire. What if I were to die or become crippled during the operation? Who would be there to care about what had happened? Who would know about all the plans I had made?

Lying flat on my back in the operating room, with nothing but a flimsy hospital gown-thing draped over me, I discussed with the anesthesiologist my preference to stay awake during the surgery; she seemed a little chagrined, but accepting. The orthopedist would have none of it: I recall him storming into the operating room, not even breaking stride as he said, "That's okay if you don't want a general anesthetic," getting me to open up in optimistic anticipation, "but I won't be doing the surgery." Punch in the stomach. Now, I had done a bad thing. Of course I would relinquish my tiny little toy gun in the presence of someone holding a nuclear weapon. I had angered a man about to pierce my flesh while I was unconscious. I don't remember what I said next; I only remember someone fitting a gas mask onto my face and counting backward from ten.

When I awoke, my red-haired girlfriend (wasn't she blonde when I went under?) and a friend of mine who was a psychiatrist at the hospital were there. I had hoped that having nearby a friend who was on the medical staff at the hospital would somehow get me better treatment, or even save my life if it were endangered. But my orthopedist, who obviously preferred to have people unconscious, had little respect for my psychiatrist buddy, whose job it was to make people less unconscious. As it turned out, though, I needed someone with a caring demeanor to break the news to me: The orthopedist had enlisted my friend to explain to me that my years of playing sports had completely worn down my knee, and that the little pain I was having was the burning friction of bone against bone. I would never again be able to participate in vigorous athletic activity.

I was devastated initially, but this feeling strangely lifted after about an hour. When I had recovered enough from the surgery to be discharged, and the anesthesia diminished to a pleasant afterglow, my girlfriend drove me home in my convertible. We stopped along the way for her to go to a hair appointment, and I waited in the car, pondering my loss of identity as an athlete so intently that I didn't even notice that when she got back in the car she was a brunette.

We drove along through the older, richer, back roads of Westchester County, and passed a vast expanse of fields and trees, encircled by a century-old, waist-high stone wall. The April afternoon was warm and cloudy, pregnant with new life and the possibility of rain. On the other side of the stone wall, small groups of people were hovering near each other, moving in clumps along the field. My cognitive functions had been slowed by the pain medication and, for about a full minute, I did not know what they were doing. I felt a longing to be with them, engaged in their activity, but I had no idea what it was. The emotional centers of my brain were unaffected by the lingering effects of the medication, but my analytical abilities were shut down. I did not dwell considerably upon what I didn't know about their activity; rather, I bathed in my longing. I felt a primal need to be with these people, doing whatever it was that they were doing. I did not even know if they were working or playing. It seemed to be both. Farther up the road, the sight of a woman pulling a flagstick out of the ground broke my state of cerebral numbness. Golf. They were playing golf.

I immediately became excited at the prospect of it. Perhaps this would pull me out of my little identity crisis. I would still be able to walk, and I could probably swing a club without hurting my knee, although I'd have to test this when I was healthy again. Yes, I was excited about this. The embarrassingly intense longing that I'd felt could, in fact, be satisfied. When I was a teenager I had had a period of playing golf every day for a single summer. At the time, I'd quit because I began to feel like I was playing an old man's game, and was pulled into the local orbit of my buddies playing team sports. Now, ironically, I associated golf with youth, and didn't even think about how the swift insertion of an arthroscope into my knee had sentenced my body to middle age as quickly as Dr. Knock-you-out could say "sedated." Golf meant endless adolescent summer days to me: Warm up by putting on your shoes, then play forty-five; go home for dinner, come back the next day. Only in retrospect can I see the human resiliency in my sudden revitalization. Part of it may have been a quirk in the timing of my brain's recovery from the pain medication: I could recall my intense, youthful joy without quite knowing what was making me happy. I felt as though a course had been set: I would play golf. My knee would not hinder me there. I was young again.

I found that my knee injury did not affect my swing at all, and the walking was therapeutic. I started off slowly at first, hitting balls occasionally, practicing my putting, then playing six-hour rounds when I was able to get onto the crowded New York area courses. Several months later, after haircolor girl had told me on Thanksgiving night that she was seeing a younger man -- while we were in the bathtub together -- I met my future wife. She was friends with a group of tennis players who also played golf, and I began to play and practice with increasing frequency. The depth of my relationship with this woman, and with the game that would infuse my life, grew in parallel. One of her friends, as well as her parents, lived in Suffern, New York, which permits residents to play at Spook Rock Golf Club, one of the finest municipal courses in the United States. Since she never had the patience for golf, she would socialize with our group on the practice range, then visit her parents while I played.

As I warmed up on the range, my focus on golf would begin to narrow, and my attention to her and the others would become fleeting, almost false. As our foursome packed up to head for the first tee, she would kiss me goodbye and say, "have fun," but I had already left. It was as though we were now characters in two completely different movies. She was in a romantic comedy, making jokes with her husband and their friends, immersed in the interaction of the people around her. I was in a war epic; my kiss goodbye was dramatic, perhaps final, as I headed off into an unknown land of potential heroics and unspeakable lurking horrors. My return was much the same: I had battles to speak of, some of them bloody. She asked incomprehensible questions, such as, "Did you have a nice time?" The contrast in our communication was like a dream, where bizarre and incongruous events are treated with nonchalance.

I: That two-tongued half-lizard, half-man is going to kill us!

She: Tea?

As my interest in golf flourished, I looked for any opportunity to play or practice. I developed a real love of hitting balls. I would practice for hours, standing behind the ball, picturing the exact flight that the ball would take, the exact swing that I would make. Then, I would approach the ball, get into my stance, and try to make the image I had created transform itself through me into a golf shot. When I was successful, I felt a great inner satisfaction. I felt as though I had a special gift, that I was able to enter into a mental state where I could turn my inner pictures into real events in the outer world. It was this extraordinary feeling, more than any other, that drove me. I felt, in each swing, that I was creating a work of art. I was making an internal image come to life. The process made me feel powerful and confident. I recalled the time in my youth when I had rejected golf, feeling that it was a meaningless activity; quite the contrary now, I felt there was something elemental in what I was doing. I felt such a basic intensity that I could have been running through the jungle, chasing my prey fifty thousand years ago, or confidently making a complicated, delicate maneuver to dock a spaceship to a space station, far in the future.

This intensity brought a tremendous joy to my life. I practiced in the evenings, played on the weekends, and spent the rest of my free time with my wife-to-be. The progress of research into the causes of mental illnesses moves slowly, and uninspired researchers like me at the time can easily get lost in the meandering crowd if they wish. I had plenty of free time if I wanted it; I didn't miss any important meetings, but I missed the unimportant ones. In a research career, there are nine bad ideas being pursued for every good one. I simply cut loose a few of the projects that were going nowhere. I sometimes worry that, by doing so, I cut loose the cure for mental illness. This is unlikely; when I looked around my department, I saw a number of people who were wasting a lot more than a few ideas. I again felt as though time were racing along, but I was no longer an observer; some of the others now seemed stuck by the side of the road, while I was flowing with the traffic in the open air. The breeze was light and the sun was warm. I felt my hands as they grasped the wheel.

When my wife-to-be and I became engaged to be married, I moved from Westchester County, New York, to Bergen County, New Jersey. This move tore me away from a region steeped in some of golf's greatest history and tradition, to an area that was ranked as the third-worst county in the United States for golf. There were four county courses, and each one was terrible. I played them whenever I could. After all, the closest I've ever gotten to the Westchester courses like Winged Foot was watching Davis Love III win the PGA championship on television. Furthermore, a mile from our apartment in Edgewater was a driving range with a putting green. It was located on a converted landfill along the Hudson River, in the heart of a Korean section of the county, and the owners of the range were Korean, as well. It had the only snack room at a golf practice facility I have ever seen that sold a variety of green teas. Some evenings, with the 100 or so stalls two-deep in people waiting to pound jumbo buckets of 200-plus balls, I was the only non-Asian there.

I took comfort in the company of my equally obsessed brothers-in-arms. I sometimes practiced deep into the evening, as the lighted range was open until midnight (a happy fact that prompted a lawsuit by the tenants of the Manhattan apartment buildings across the Hudson, who were kept awake by the glaring lights). During the winter, the range was heated, and each stall was encased on three sides by thick, insulating plastic. During a strange weather period that included a series of ice storms, the range was covered in a thick blanket of ice, and each shot skittered and bounced along as though frictionless, until it found the net at the back of the range. This was the first time that I had been able to work on my swing through a winter, and the dramatic improvements made me wonder how professional golfers could ever be raised outside of southern climes.

At times, when I practiced, I had a vague feeling of a presence with me. It was sometimes the inner chattering of my mind, perhaps half words and part phrases directed toward improving my swing: Hands there...loose, uh-huh...through to finish, like that...felt the big muscles that time...yuh. When the chattering died down and my focus improved, the presence remained, hanging there. One day, quite suddenly, a warm and pleasing sensation spread through my chest. I felt happy and sad at the same time, and I felt vulnerable, yet safe. I was somewhat confused by all this, and was reminded of the time when I had first fallen in love with my wife. As I stood pondering all these different feelings, I developed a distinct and startling impression that I was not alone.

A few weeks later, as I practiced at the range in the summer, I again had the feeling of a presence with me. At first, it was like background music -- a nice accompaniment that seemed to comfort me as I hit each shot. It then became fuller and more encompassing. My swing felt particularly fluid that day, and I was amazed at my ability to visualize the exact trajectory of where I wanted the ball to go, and then to manifest that same image by hitting the ball just right. I worked on moving the ball from left to right and right to left around the different flags that covered the practice area, and never felt more in control of making the ball go wherever I wanted it to. Yet, I had a strange feeling that it was not me swinging the club. It wasn't that I felt as though I were possessed, or taken over by an alien force, or anything weird like that. It was just that I felt I didn't need to put forth any effort to swing the club. The initial part of my swing, when I first brought the club back, was happening on its own. It seemed at times that the club was swinging itself. I had an impulse to head out onto the course and play a quick round, figuring that I shouldn't waste all these great shots on the practice range, but I was so enthralled and focused on what I was doing, I just kept hitting away.

I decided to experiment. I aimed at a telephone pole that held up the net at the back of the practice range, about 250 yards away. The ground was very hard and dry, so my best drives could hit the net after a few bounces. I got behind the ball and aligned myself toward the pole, then saw a picture of my drive sailing off toward the net, bouncing twice, and landing solidly against the pole. I even heard the distant plonk of the ball smacking against the wood, like a broom handle on a coconut. As I got into my stance and readied myself to swing, I completely let go of any feeling of trying to hit the shot. Years before, I had read a book about Zen Buddhist archers who draw back their bows then, rather than shoot the arrow, wait for the arrow to be loosed toward the target. I followed the same approach: I waited for the club to be swung. I did not try. I only waited. When the club finally began moving back, I felt almost as though I were an observer. I knew they were my hands, and my club, and my torso twisting my weight onto my right foot, but I felt that the swing was being started, and completed, as if of its own accord. Just as I had pictured seconds before, the ball rocketed toward the telephone pole on a straight, unwavering line, took two hops along the same line and bounced up against the pole.

Goose bumps raised along my neck and shoulders. I didn't initially feel a sense of pride; what I had just witnessed ...