BlakeAtwood.com

I first became aware of author Steven Pressfield because of his kick-you-in-the-face book on writing, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. It’s concise, stellar, and brutal. If you crave creative fulfillment, you need this book.

I was consequently delightfully surprised to learn that he wrote The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life. And while I think I saw the movie, I can’t remember if I finished it. I picked up Legend about a month ago from a local used bookstore. I read it this past weekend. I’ve read a few other books on the “mystic” qualities of golf and life, but they all pale in comparison to what Pressfield did in Bagger. And while I plan to watch the movie again, I’m pretty sure the screen adaptation doesn’t live up to where the book took me. To wit, this passage, especially pointed for the smitten, frustrated golfer:

“The search for the Authentic Swing is a parallel to the search for the Self. We as golfers pursue that elusive essence our entire lives. What hooks us about the game is that it gives us glimpses. Glimpses of our Authentic Swing, like a mystic being granted a vision of the face of God. All we need is to experience it once – one mid-iron screaming like a bullet toward the flag, one driver flushed down the middle – and we’re enslaved forever. We feel with absolute certainty that if we could only swing like that all the time, we would be our best selves, our true selves, our Authentic Selves. That’s why we lionize men like Hagen and Jones and treat them like gods. They are gods in that sense, the sense that they have found their Authentic Selves, at least within the realm of golf.”

The difference bewtween success and failure?
Timing.

HT: FailBlog

…as copied from a footnote in Brian McLaren‘s newest book, A New Kind of Christianity. The quote isn’t indicative of the book as a whole, thus it’s inclusion in the footnotes, but it resonated with me, and I thought it appropriate to post:

“Bernard of Clairvaux understood what it means to be a friend to oneself. He spoke of four stages in the spiritual life, beginning with learning to love oneself for one’s own sake. This is the infant, nursing at his mother’s breast, ecstatic in the warmth of being held and filled, but unaware of anyone outside his own skin.

Then comes loving God for one’s own sake. This is the child who learns to appreciate his mother, maybe to draw her a picture or gather her a bouquet of flowers, overflowing with love mixed with gratitude for all she dos for him.

Then comes loving God for God’s own sake. This is the adolescent or young adult who begins to see his mother for who she is, not just for what she does for him, and his love grows even deeper.

One wonders how any love could go deeper than this, but Bernard sees yet another dimension to the journey of life: loving oneself for God’s sake. This is the young man who has made a mess of his life and feels knocked down and beaten up, but then thinks of how much his mother loves him, and her love inspires him to not give up, but to get up and give life another go.”

I don’t think I suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder in real life, but I might suffer from TDD, Technology Deficit Disorder. Even if a program works fine for me and I have a firm grasp of its inner workings, I tend to want to try out whatever is newest, or different, or has more features (even if I’ll never use them).  I’ve accessed twitter in a number of ways, via twitter.com, brizzly.com, twitterific for iPhone, echofon for iPhone, Tweetie for iPhone and Mac, and Hootsuite.

Since Twitter’s a hot topic (and a current addiction), I’m interested to see what you use.

Pick only the main way you access twitter. If you use a specific website (other than twitter.com) or a specific desktop or mobile app, leave that information in the “other” answer area.

If you think the post title doesn’t make sense, wait till you see this. I’m not sure if I love it or hate it or both at the same time. The ending is face-meltingly awesome.

HT: TV Squad (“It’s so bad that it’s either making Jesus laugh or God cry in that order.”) and Everything is Terrible (“the greatest Christian Sci-fi story ever told.”)