We can only be truly happy if we have peaceful souls as well as peaceful minds.
In June 2008, Tiger Woods won an eighteen-hole playoff to win the US Open golf championship for the third time. It was his fourteenth victory at a major, and some described it as one of the finest victories ever seen in the sport. And what’s more, he did the whole thing with a leg that was broken in two places.
It was the high point of Woods’s career. But not long afterward, the golfer’s world collapsed. For 21 days, the front pages of the New York Post detailed his affairs with porn stars and waitresses, as well as trysts in church parking lots and with the young daughters of family friends. His secret life exposed, Woods didn’t win another major for over ten years.
As the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh has said, while the surface of the ocean may seem still, underneath there are currents. That was certainly the case for Tiger Woods, a man famous for his ability to find stillness in moments of stress who was, in fact, at the mercy of powerful riptides lurking under the surface.
That’s no surprise once you understand how Tiger Woods was raised to be a champion. His father, recognizing that golf relies on an ability to keep a clear head, would taunt Woods as he tried to tee off, calling him a “motherfucker” or slinging racist abuse at moments of high concentration. His mother threatened to beat him if he ruined her reputation as a parent. In Woods’s own words, he was raised to be a cold-blooded killer on the golf course. And it worked. His upbringing made him a great champion. But it also left him with a profoundly troubled soul, which drove him to neglect and betray his family in pursuit of dishonest and ultimately dissatisfying affairs.
Later Woods reflected on this time in his life and realized that if you’re lying all the time, life is no fun. Woods’s story shows that the relentless pursuit of anything isn’t worth it if we damage our souls in the process.
As we’ve seen, stillness is handy for becoming more effective in business or in sports. But what’s it all for if in our personal lives we’re more like hot-blooded, raging bulls than the serene monks we aim to be? Our happiness, and our contentedness in life, comes from achieving stillness of the soul.
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