No, not another ratings thread - well, not exactly.
It's very cold here. I am not playing golf. I have lost significant flexibility since I last picked up a club. I can touch my toes, yes, but a full shoulder turn is currently out of the question.
So I stumbled across a passage from Soren Kierkegaard -- perfect for these cold, dark non-golfing days, especially as reading requires no significant shoulder turn. Reading it, and with some imagined word-changes/replacements (that I'm sure you can intuit) to make it more golf related, I found it an interesting comment on our seemingly endless desire/capacity for "comparison" and the "rankings" that necessarily result. Not so OT, perhaps -- as Mr. Kierkegaard was from Denmark and the Dane Thomas Bjorn almost won the 2003 Open at Sandwich.
"Worldly worry always seeks to lead a human being into the small-minded unrest of comparisons, away from the lofty calmness of simple thoughts...Those great, uplifting, simple thoughts, those first thoughts, are more and more forgotten, perhaps entirely forgotten in the weekday and worldly life of comparisons. The one human being compares himself with others, the one generation compares itself with the other, and thus the heaped-up pile of comparisons overwhelms a person. As the ingenuity and busyness increase, there come to be more and more in each generation who slavishly work a whole lifetime far down in the low underground regions of comparisons. Indeed, just as miners never see the light of day, so these unhappy people never come to see the light: those uplifting, simple thoughts, those first thoughts about how glorious it is to be a human being."