Opening paragraphs...............................

Have you ever had blackjack tea, Michael?
     The real stuff, I mean.  One of my patients gave me these, cured sassafras root from Plaquemines Parish in Louisiana.  Something mysterious and potent about it.  Clears the head.  You can stay up all night with your brain so lucid it almost feels transparent.  Smell the earth in it?  Something about tea from roots, as opposed to leaves.  Something deeper, more connected to the source.  I remember that rooty, woodsy smell from winter mornings as a boy.  My mother said only a Yankee or a fool sweetened blackjack tea with sugar,  It had to be molasses.  And no milk.  The farthest afield she'd stray was to serve it au citron, like the Creoles.  But I'm wandering already, and you've barely even sat down.
     How are you, young man?  No doubt you're expecting a lecture, but I promise that's the last thing I intend.  Your decision to leave medical school is your own entirely.  I can even understand and sympathize.  Around the third year, when exhaustion and nausea have taken up permanent residence in you bones, the healing profession seems less like a calling and more like an exercise in expedience and venality.  I understand that brand of despair better than I wish.  But it's a different decision you've made that troubles me more deeply.
     I mean your choice to give up golf.

-Steven Pressfield,  The Legend of Bagger Vance:  Golf and the Game of Life