Winston Churchill is credited for saying, “Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into an ever smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose.” Is it fair to say that the last piece of that quote applies to life as well?

I recently spent a few days in the Rocky Mountains. Colorado Springs, Colorado, to be precise. A business trip landed me in a government hotel that looked more like an abandoned asylum than it did a hotel. If it had been on my dime, I wouldn’t have even walked into the sad excuse for a lobby. In fact, I probably wouldn’t have even tapped the brakes as I drove by in my rental car. This place was ill-equipped to be a hotel.

Using my years old keycard, with which I’d gotten the warning, “Don’t put it in the same pocket as your phone or it will deactivate it and I’m only allowed to give you two extra ones,” I entered my room with minimal hope that the renovation just hadn’t made it to the outside of the building. My hopes were dashed when I saw floral border, a window A/C unit and a Sharp tube television resting on a piece of furniture that resembled something I’d once placed on the sidewalk after moving out of a college apartment. But the mountains have a way of forcing the give-a-damn out of you.

The first couple of work days ended a bit early and around 3:30 p.m., so on Wednesday I found myself suddenly with about four hours of daylight to fill. What better to do than play golf, right?

I found the local course and walked into the clubhouse, which, much to my surprise, was infinitely nicer than my sorry excuse for lodging. I asked what rental clubs they had expecting to hear only one option: Callaway Strata 12-piece men’s set. Also to my surprise, they offered premium rentals that included a Titleist set of either AP1 or AP2 irons, all 2017 Titleist woods and hybrids and a Cleveland milled putter. They also offered the new Mizuno JPX-900 irons in both cast and forged models (with Project X 5.5 shafts) and the new Mizuno JPX hybrid and woods. “I’ll have the Mizunos, please.” Those weapons are not ill-designed for the task.

Earlier that day I’d been driving back from eating lunch and the Rockies were on the right side of the road. As the radio shuffled through the playlist on my phone, an old Vince Gill song came through the speakers, “Go Rest High On That Mountain.” When that song came on the radio I found myself about halfway through singing along with Vince. And before it was over, I had to wipe my eyes. (If by some stretch of the imagination you’ve never heard this song, you must watch this video of him doing it in tribute to George Jones, you can skip to 7:20 in the video.)

What you must know about me, though, is that I’m a broken man. In 2013 my wife and I brought a little girl into this world. She was about seven pounds with dark hair and beautiful eyes. In 2014, while I was deployed to Afghanistan, she got really sick. So sick that I had to leave Afghanistan to be by her side. After many weeks in the hospital, she didn’t make it. A terrible combination of influenza and a respiratory virus was more than her nine-month-old body could handle. It was, and continues to be, devastating. But there are two ways you spiral after a family tragedy of that magnitude: up or down. There’s little room to stay in between.

Over the next three years I would write a lot and play golf, often doing one or both of those things at the expense of spending time with my family. As Churchill said, we are often using weapons in life that are ill-designed to deal with such an event as the loss of a child. In that video Vince Gill says, “Brother George [Jones] taught us all how sing with a broken heart.” If we can learn how to play golf with a crooked stick, then we can learn how to go through life with the broken hearts we pile up along our path. It’s just that sometimes we need reminding.

As I pulled the cart strap around the bag and clamped it down, I looked up at the mountains that embrace the property and thought about the Vince Gill song. I also thought about my daughter. It’s hard to convey the existential things that happen on a golf course when you play by yourself. It doesn’t happen all that often, but when it does you can’t help but share it with someone. When I rented the Mizunos in the clubhouse, all I was trying to do was take an opportunity to play golf and try out some clubs that were creating buzz in the golf world. What ended up happening was some unexpected healing.

My opening tee shot went a little right (I blamed it on the new driver). I hopped in and steered the cart to the opposite side of the hole, veering off the cart path to find my ball in some slight rough. I promptly hit a wedge just short of the green (my altitude calculations for yardage weren’t very precise), jumped back in the cart and drove to the green. Pumping the parking brake on the cart, I got out and saw the marshall approaching the green. He said, “It’s cart-path only on the course today,” and I apologized. At first, I was annoyed because neither the pro nor the marshall had given me this information and, had I known that I wouldn’t have paid for a cart.

With bygones being bygones, I went about my round. It turns out, the cart-path only status gave me more time to walk and take in the scenery, so there’s the first uptick in the spiral. Since I was alone, I started playing music through my iPhone and kept on rolling. As I tell you the next part of this story it will be hard for you not to think I made it up, but I promise, it happened just as you read it.

I played the first 11 holes just letting one of my playlists cycle through some ballads (I’m a ballad kind of guy) and I pulled up to the par-4 12th hole. When I stepped out of the cart I grabbed my phone out of my pocket to take a picture and that damn Vince Gill song came on again. While the intro was playing, I took this picture.

I had to reset over the golf ball three times because I couldn’t keep my composure. Finally, on the fourth attempt, I striped a drive right over that fairway bunker you see, almost directly in line with the top of that mountain. When I got to my ball the song was about halfway through and Vince Gill was in the middle of a silky guitar solo. I played the shot to the front of the green and it bounced up to about 25 feet. To that point, I hadn’t made a birdie in the round and didn’t expect this one to fall either. (I wasn’t worried about the score all that much with rented clubs at 8,000 feet above sea level.) The universe had other plans.

I parked the cart and walked to the green with my Cleveland milled putter in hand, pulled the flag and lined up my putt. I set up over the ball and took my practice strokes looking at the hole (as I always do). As I placed the putter behind the ball I could still hear the song playing in my pocket. I made the stroke and the ball took off. It broke about six inches around the halfway mark (not what I read) and fell into the hole. It would be the only birdie I’d make all day.

As I replaced the flag and walked off the green the music stopped. I’d reached the end of my playlist.

I finished the round in quiet solitude, admiring the mountains and the lesson they’d taught me. Sometimes, in order to move forward in life, ill-designed tools are the only thing you need. And sometimes, they aren’t so ill-designed. Maybe golf is a game where we play with weapons better suited for chopping down baby trees or tilling a garden, but if it were easy it wouldn’t be something you did for a lifetime.

I’ve been playing golf for over half my life to some degree, and it’s never meant more to me than it did that day. Not because of any specific shot, but because of the power residing in the desire to improve at something. I walked into the clubhouse expecting to get some rentals and play a round of golf, then grab some dinner and spend the rest of the night in the room. I did those things, but somewhere in the middle of the round I realized that I’d been trying to avoid dealing with something terrible that happened to my family, something I couldn’t control and can’t change.

That’s why we love golf, right? Because we think that we can control the outcome with enough grinding and mindless practice. As we all soon learn, though, mindless practice will get you nowhere in this game… and that’s the same in life. I don’t want to build up the moment on 12th hole as something that will will forever change my life; it’s too early to tell, but it did change my day and my week.

Churchill was right, we’re trying to hit a “very small ball.” The last time I checked, though, the hole was bigger than the ball.