I'm Going Pro

Haters, it's New Year's Eve.  The first Slam of the 2014 is just two weeks away.  Tennis is coming out of its six week dormancy, and I must come with it.  

Kicking and screaming, I might add, because I've liked the break. More honestly, my fear of tennis and writing has just dived into the holiday season excuses like a sugar-addled tot into the Christmas cookies.  I have so many other tasks to do, I need down time because of all my tasks, I'm away from home, I'm at home, it's cold, it's not cold enough.  

If Robert Duvall were crouched at the edge of the foxhole of my apartment, he'd take a deep breath and say, "Smell that?  Do you smell that?  Reisistance, son.  Nothing else in the world smells like that." 

Resistance is the topic of the aptly-named The War of Art by Steven Pressfield.  

Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work.  it will perjure, fabricate, falsify; seduce, bully, cajole.  Resistance is protean.  It will assume any form, if that's what it takes to deceive you.  it will reason with you like a lawyer or jam a nine-millimeter in your face ike a stickup man.  Resistance has no conscience.  It will pledge anything to get a deal, then double-cross you as soon as your back is turned.  If you take Resistance at its word, you deserve everything you get.  Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.

I've been full of shit, Haters.  My New Year's resolution: a new story, about tennis and about writing.  In my story, I'm going Pro.  And I don't mean I'm joining the Tour.  I'm going Pro as in, laying down Napalm along the treeline of my Resistance.

Or, as Pressfield explains, to apply the same principles to what we love and desire to create as we do the jobs that provide our paychecks.  Those qualities include showing up every day, showing up no matter what, we don't go home until the whistle blows and we commit over the long haul. 

"Resistance hates it when we go pro," Pressfield said.

I look forward to finding this out.