It starts with the sound.
The slow rhythmic crunch of spikes on damp turf, the wind shifting through the dunes, the distant hum of the ocean—steady, patient, like it knows something you don’t. The rhythmic clatter of your clubs against each other as you walk, an occasional deep sigh when the last shot wasn’t what it was meant to be.
You feel it in your legs first—miles stacking up beneath your feet, the ground giving slightly under the weight of yet another round played in a place that doesn’t care who you are.
We say golf is a good walk spoiled, but is that true? Or is it the last great purposeful walk in a world that no longer values the journey?
Is golf a game, or is it something closer to a ritual—a journey to nowhere in particular, and yet, somehow, exactly where we need to be?
Why We Keep Coming Back
Nobody needs to play golf.
It isn’t survival. It won’t keep you warm in the winter or put food on the table. If anything, it does the opposite—it takes. Time. Money. Patience. Sanity. And yet, we wake up early, we drive for hours, we walk for miles, we fight the course and ourselves in a quiet, stubborn pursuit of something we can never quite name.
Why?
Because it’s the ritual.
The way you pull on the same sweater. The way the first tee shot, good or bad, sets the tone for the next four hours of your life. The way you know, deep down, that the course doesn’t care about you—but you’ll still show it respect.
Somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves that golf is about scorecards, swings and statistics. It isn’t.
Golf is about place.
Bourdain once wrote about the silent code of a great meal—how certain dishes, certain chefs, certain restaurants could elevate food into something almost sacred. Golf courses do the same.
Some courses demand reverence. You don’t just play them—you arrive. You look around, you feel the weight of the wind, the shape of the land, the way the turf sits beneath your feet. You don’t just play the holes—you pay tribute to them.
Because when you’re out there, standing on some ancient fairway, staring down a shot that hundreds of others have faced before you, what else is it, if not a pilgrimage?
The Suffering: Is It Worth It?
Then again, there’s another side to all of this.The walks that don’t feel noble, that don’t feel like pilgrimages—just exercises in futility.
The days where the rain seeps into your socks before you’ve reached the second tee. Where the wind doesn’t just push your ball offline, it slaps you across the face. The rounds where you hit four perfect shots and still walk off with a double, where the golf gods punish you simply because they can.
Are we wasting our time?
Maybe.
Maybe golf is a distraction, something that fills space, something that lets us pretend we’re doing something meaningful when really, we’re just passing hours.
Because golf is, by design, a game of failure. The best players in the world still lose more than they win. And the rest of us? We don’t stand a chance.
But then, on the 16th hole, you hit one—one that comes out like a secret you didn’t know you were keeping. You hear it before you even see it, the click of perfection, the purest connection between intent and reality. The ball climbs into the sky, the wind carries it just right, it lands soft and rolls true.
For that moment, everything is justified.
And just like that, it all makes sense again.
The Walk Continues
It always ends the same way.
You get back to the clubhouse, legs aching, scorecard ruined, mind still replaying every bad shot, every missed putt, every mistake.
You tell yourself you’ll be back. Maybe next week. Maybe sooner. Maybe not at all. But you know the truth.
Because it’s not about the score. It’s not even about the game. It’s about the walk itself. The truth is, we don’t just walk golf courses. We walk through ourselves—our patience, our resilience, our relationship with failure.
A good walk wasted?
No.
A pilgrimage?
Absolutely.
And we’ll keep taking it.
Every single time.
