The Switch

I wanted to let the few people who followed this blog know that I've begun a new website/blog that I will be using more regularly. I haven't set everything up, so you can't subscribe by email yet or make comments.

aradosevichproject.com is the address

The format right now is smaller chunks than on this blog. I post links, quotes, and pictures. I also post thoughts in longer form occasionally. The smaller format allows me to post thoughts and other things I find interesting without taking a lot of time. I hope to write longer pieces in the future that wouldn't be a good fit on a blog. I'm planning other ways to post those.

See you guys at the other site. Thanks for reading.

I'm taking a break

I'm taking a break from my blog for a few weeks. I've really enjoyed writing for it because it's given me a chance to write regularly for two years. I don't know that many people are reading it, but it's been nice nonetheless.

My break is to think about my writing and what I want to accomplish with it. I've been reading a lot and generating a lot of ideas, but I don't know if the short form of blogging is best for me right now.

So I'll post later to let you know what I'm doing and where my writing will be in the future. Thanks.

Do What You Can Do

Pressure forces us to do what we can really do. It forces us to raise our performance.

Where there is no pressure--internal or external--performance suffers. An athlete pushes her muscles to go further than they are used to to build them up. My GRE score increases rapidly in the weeks leading up to the test. A student only studies the night before an exam.

The real task is putting pressure on before someone puts it on us.

Soup Tuesday-a little bit of everything

• We watched WALL-E for the first time yesterday. It is a great movie and a masterpiece of storytelling. It's got to be one of Pixar's best movies because of how much it moved me. Some of their earlier movies are more entertaining-The Incredibles and Monster's Inc. But WALL-E had me smiling, dreading, cheering, and having fun with the characters.
  
• Emma and I read The City of Ember to each other last week. We were reading over each other's shoulders one night, so we just decided to read it aloud and stop competing. It's another great story.
  
• I reread From the Ground Up: New Testament Foundations for the 21st Century Church. That's a great book because it corrects my thinking that the church is a building or meeting time.
• My GRE score is going up. I've got less than two weeks to go and am studying hard. Emma rolled her eyes when I said, "I got one question wrong because I thought the antonym of dour was modish and not blithe." She has forbidden me to use the words I'm learning like tyro (it means amateur).
• I picked up The Reason for God from the library. As soon as I finish with my GRE study, I'll begin this book while trying to finish Confessions.
  

Hitting the Wall: part 2

Yesterday, I talked about two kinds of barriers and two strategies for those barriers. Part of wisdom is staying the course on barriers that don't fall easily. The other part of wisdom is quitting when the job is impossible.

One warning: Quitting before impossible barriers is wise and right only when the goal is inconsequential. If the cause is worth dying for, we should be fully prepared to keep going no matter the outcome.

William Wilberforce spent 46 years fighting slavery in the British Empire before it was abolished. He heard the news 3 days before his death. Many others died before seeing that success.

There are some causes bigger than sight.

Hitting the Wall

I'm finding that there are two kinds of barriers.

• Walls that we can break by working harder or longer.

• Walls that will not come down no matter how hard or long we work.
  

Making it to the U.S. National Soccer Team included walls I could never get through no matter how hard or long I worked. But I could work through the barriers to becoming a good soccer player.

When you hit a wall you can do one of two things.

1) You can keep going until you get through
2) You can give up and go a different direction

Wisdom means discerning what kind of wall you're up against and responding appropriately.

The Best Section of the Library

My favorite section of the library is the "young adult" section. That is the side filled with Mark Twain, Jules Verne, J.K. Rowling, Lois Lowry, Louis Sachar, C.S. Lewis, etc. Those are the books that kept (and still keep) me up at night because I can't put the book down. I like to browse the young adult sections of bookstores too because I know that some of them are classics waiting to be discovered.

I found a new one. It's called, The City of Ember, and Emma and I decided to read it aloud to each other instead of trading reading time.

*The movie version comes out tomorrow, and Walden Media, the company that made Ember and the movie versions of Narnia, picks some amazing books to turn into movies. So it's always a good idea to pick up whichever title they are working on. Your almost assured a great book.