The one thing I remember from an existential psychology class I took in 1972 was the concept of “Peak Experience” coined by Abraham Maslow. Since 1978 I’ve had a fairly boring and stressful day job that requires me to travel from time to time with more frequency as I’ve gotten older. I also travel a couple times a year for a not for profit that I support. For me travel is not fun. I primarily travel as a single. About ten years ago I started taking my golf clubs on every trip and extending the trip on the front and/or back end to play a few rounds. As a single I am often the first one out in the morning playing a new course as the sun rises. Other times I get paired up with locals and make new friends. I’ve found that people are almost universally nice on a golf course. Sometimes I’ll reconnect with old friends in the city I’m visiting. The main thing for me is just experiencing a course for the first time. Some of these rounds have provided my Peak Experiences of the past ten years. Some of the best have been a couple of the Heathland courses in Surrey where I imagined myself 100 years in the past. Last year I took a mini adventure prior to a trip to Denver that took me to Wildhorse, Bayside and Ballyneal. Standing on the 4th tee at Ballyneal was a Peak Experience. Being on a course in a new place and just getting caught up in the moment, connecting with the ones you’re with and those who have walked the paths before you and soaking in the wind, sun, clouds or rain, and the wildlife is why I love traveling to new courses. Our Stadiums are the best of any sport even when they have little GCA merit.
As a foot note, Peak Experiences are described by Maslow as especially joyous and exciting moments in life, involving sudden feelings of intense happiness and well-being, wonder and awe, and possibly also involving an awareness of transcendental unity or knowledge of higher truth (as though perceiving the world from an altered, and often vastly profound and awe-inspiring perspective)Maslow describes how the peak experience tends to be uplifting and ego-transcending; it releases creative energies; it affirms the meaning and value of existence; it gives a sense of purpose to the individual; it gives a feeling of integration; it leaves a permanent mark on the individual, evidently changing them for the better. Peak experiences can be therapeutic in that they tend to increase the individual's free will, self-determination, creativity, and empathy. The highest peaks include "feelings of limitless horizons opening up to the vision, the feeling of being simultaneously more powerful and also more helpless than one ever was before, the feeling of great wonder and awe, and the loss of placing in time and space.
I’m not that nutty, but it does happen