The Golf Balls

A participant in one of our groups once said something that has stayed with me.

We had been talking about routines, wellbeing and the things that sustain us when life becomes busy, difficult or overwhelming.

At the end of the session he paused and said:

"I don't think I've got any golf balls in my life."

He was referring to the old story about priorities. The one where a jar is filled first with golf balls, then pebbles, then sand. The golf balls represent the things that matter most.

Relationships.

Purpose.

Connection.

The things that make a life a life.

I thought about that comment for a long time afterwards.

Not because it was unusual.

Because I hear versions of it everywhere.

Sometimes it sounds like:

"I used to sing."

"I haven't been swimming in years."

"I don't really see anyone anymore."

"I don't know what I enjoy."

Or simply:

"I'm tired."

Perhaps that is partly why I found myself changing direction.

I trained first as a doctor.

Later, I trained as an occupational therapist.

From the outside, that can look like an unusual move. A step sideways. Perhaps even a step down.

For me, it felt more like a return.

Towards the end of my medical training, I realised I felt increasingly unhappy. Not because I had fallen out of love with patients. Quite the opposite.

It felt more like a loss of faith.

Not in medicine itself, but in the version of helping that I found myself practising.

When I started medical school, I believed I could help make people feel better. I imagined cutting through what was wrong and expanding what was right. I wanted to see the human being behind the diagnosis.

Yet I found myself hungry for a different kind of knowledge.

Not how to interpret another blood test result.

Not how to order another chest X-ray.

But how to hold space for a group in transition.

What words help someone imagine a different future.

How to sit alongside uncertainty.

How to hold someone's hand as they leave the house for the first time in months.

How confidence returns.

How belonging grows.

How people rebuild lives.

Occupational therapy seemed to offer a language for the things I had been searching for all along.

Without glamour.

Without hierarchy.

Without much status at all.

But with something else.

Connection.

Participation.

Possibility.

I began to remember what had fascinated me in the first place.

Not illness.

People.

The person singing in a dementia choir, unselfconscious and remembering.

Someone rock climbing again with a new prosthesis.

A woman visiting her brother's grave for the first time in years.

A participant discovering she deserved enough care to make herself a cup of tea each day.

A man realising he had no golf balls left in his life.

What struck me was not the activity itself.

It was the vitality.

The way participation seemed to create movement.

New confidence.

New relationships.

New identities.

New possibilities.

A widening of life.

That fascination has never really left me.

Today I run Vital Adaptation.

The clue is in the name.

Whether I'm developing wellbeing programmes, supporting behaviour change, exploring outdoor participation, creating community events, or working alongside organisations, I find myself returning to the same question:

How do we help people participate in the things that matter to them?

Because participation is rarely just participation.

It is confidence.

Connection.

Identity.

Purpose.

Belonging.

Health.

I don't think healthcare has forgotten these things.

I think we are often so busy responding to crisis that we have little space to nurture what helps people flourish.

And yet I wonder whether some of the most important work happens there.

Not in fixing people.

But in helping them reconnect with the people, places and activities that make life meaningful.

The participant who spoke about golf balls probably doesn't remember making that comment.

I do.

Because it felt like a reminder.

A reminder that wellbeing is not only about reducing illness.

It is also about creating space for the things that matter most.

The golf balls.

The things that make a life worth living.

And perhaps the question is not whether we have time for them.

Perhaps the question is what happens when we don't.

#sagepractice  #humanityinhealthcare #bodymind #creativehealth #staffwellbeing #humanityinhealthcare

Sage Practices Reflection:
How often, in the blur of busy lives, do we notice the golf balls are missing? That noticing is what can stop us in our tracks — and offer us, as it did Joanna, the chance to choose a different path.

It's the question underneath all this that stays with us. We tend to ask whether we have time for the things that matter, or tell ourselves there'll be more time later. Rarely do we ask the harder question: what happens to us, slowly, when we don't make room for them at all.