The Legend of Bagger Vance

I really loved The Legend of Bagger Vance.  I have read in more than one book that most people don’t realize that when they seek happiness, they are actually seeking that one thing that makes them forget about everything else.  That was a really confusing statement, so I’ll explain.  In the movie, Bagger Vance keeps encouraging Junuh to forget about everything else but the course and to find his natural swing.  He tells Junuh to watch Bobby Jones and the way he waits for the swing to come.  Jones doesn’t force the right swing or try to whack the ball into the hole, he’s patient and works with the course rather than against it.  When Junuh finally does this, all of the crowd disappears, including Bagger, and it’s just him and the course.  In middle school I was really bad at shooting free throws, so my coach suggested I visualize the ball going in before shooting.  I asked him how that would help, and he said he’d read somewhere that it worked.  It sounded like total weird voodoo crap to me, so I refused to do it.  Then, my senior year of high school, I read The Peaceful Warrior.  The book is based on a gymnast who breaks his leg, and has to learn how to properly train his mind and body in order heal.  He discovers that while he is doing gymnastics, he forgets about everything else.  He experiences a sort of silence that his mentor recognizes as total focus, and explains that our minds enjoy nothing more than our entire mind and body experiencing the single moment we are in.  We each have at least one thing that allows us to do this naturally, and The Peaceful Warrior argues that every individual spends his life subconsciously searching for it.  Junuh’s focus, and therefore sense of peace, comes from golf.  It was really cool for me to see how this film pulled together all of the different experiences I had with this idea and gave it a visual representation.