Dear Harvey,
I’ve drafted a series of letters called Staying in the Game (Fractals).
The more you investigate a subject you’re curious about, the more hidden edges and unanswered questions you will find, much like zooming into a mathematical fractal reveals endless new details.
About the series
The introduction to the series is here, where I explain more about the ‘fractals’ I want to investigate. This letter is Fractal I: Open Spaces. Later I will share three other ‘fractals’, each in a separate letter:
- Fractal II: The Contest of Years
- Fractal III: The Gift of Restless Striving
- Fractal IV: The Circles of Teaching
- Dear Harvey: What Remains?
A fine round of golf
I played one of my best competitive rounds of the year recently-8th place out of 86 golfers in a monthly medal. What changed wasn’t my grip or my clubs, but my body. I stayed more balanced, let my upper body soften, and used some of the new range of motion I’ve been working on through assisted stretching at KOYO Wellness in Richmond. My swing felt less forced and more free.
KOYO Wellness is a London-based studio that blends cutting-edge, science-backed treatments with a human touch to help people optimise body and mind. Their ethos is built around four pillars-optimisation, vitality, pioneering, and connection-delivering services like cryotherapy, assisted stretching, infrared sauna, and contrast therapy in a welcoming, community-driven space.
The people in the Richmond studio are all just lovely, bright-minded, fun individuals. It’s the people that make the business.
Assisted Stretching with Colin Bramble
At KOYO, I’ve been working with Colin Bramble, whose calm, attentive style makes even the most stubborn joints feel like they might open. Colin has a gift for spotting where movement is stuck and for guiding you patiently into new spaces you didn’t think you could reach.
In our session, we discovered how stubborn my right side has become-hips, arms, shoulder, neck all holding on too tightly. With some patience, Colin showed me that even these long-stiff places can be retrained. That gave me hope.
“Great work today, Page! I appreciated how you were open to something a little new in combining breath-work with new, unfamiliar positions, any subtle shifts you felt (if any?) show you’re tuning into a deeper sensory level.”
When life opens space
Harvey, you taught, “A golfer should always be relaxed, never tense. The swing should feel natural.” What I am learning is that physical openness-hips turning, shoulders releasing-is inseparable from a larger kind of openness. The same way a joint can loosen over time, the spaces life opens through loss or change can loosen us, if we’re willing to stay with them.
Our daughter, son-in-law, and granddaughter have retmoved back to Atlanta, leaving our space here in England unusually quiet. At first, I felt the silence as a closing. But I’m beginning to see it differently, more like a clearing. Renewal doesn’t come from bracing against change. It comes from inhabiting the open space, patiently, and letting it shape you.
Spaces become renewal
Maria Popova, writing about Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces, reminds us that emptiness is not merely absence but a kind of terrain in its own right. After losing her partner, Ehrlich moved to the wide plains of Wyoming, where the harshness of the land mirrored her grief. Yet what she discovered was not just desolation-it was, as she put it, “an odd kind of fullness.”
Loss stripped her down, but it also created a clearing where new forms of life and attention could take root. Popova calls this process “recomposition”: the way endings can unmake us and then remake us in a different, often stronger shape.
That vision connects directly to the “open spaces” I’ve been working on with Colin. Just as Ehrlich learned to live inside the austere openness of Wyoming, I’m learning to move into the spaces that grief and stiffness create-whether in a quieter house or in a tight hip.
Neither space is comfortable at first. Both feel like loss. But if Ehrlich’s landscape could become a place of renewal, then perhaps these physical and emotional clearings can too. Openness, whether in the body or in life, is not something to rush or fill. It is something to inhabit-patiently, attentively-until its hidden fullness shows itself.
In that sense, what I’m discovering on the practice tee and in the quiet of this house is the same lesson Ehrlich found on the plains: the spaces we resist at first may become the very ground where renewal begins.
Don’t rush it
Harvey, your words echo here too: “Don’t rush it.” Whether on the backswing or in the face of grief, the wisdom is the same. Don’t force. Don’t fill too quickly. Wait, breathe, stay open.
So, I write to you, Harvey, from the practice tee and from this quieter house. Both ask me to trust that openness can be the very place where possibility begins again.
Yours,
gPage
“Millions of people were charmed by the homespun golf advice dispensed in Harvey Penick’s Little Red Book, a sports classic that became the best-selling sports book of all time. Yet, beyond the Texas golf courses where Penick happily toiled for the better part of eight decades, few people knew the self-made golf pro who coaxed the best out of countless greats — Tom Kite, Ben Crenshaw, Betsy Rawls, Mickey Wright — all champions who considered Penick their coach and lifelong friend.” – Kevin Robbins, author of Harvey Penick: The Life and Wisdom of the Man Who Wrote the Book on Golf.
