12:30PM
I’m sweating. And oh how good does it feel.
The sun came out, the air warmed, and I found myself moving the cars out of the driveway so that I could shoot some hoops. I think I mentioned before how I had been living nostalgia by playing basketball at my childhood home. Well, I didn’t talk about how I seem to be shooting better now than I may have ever shot.
You see, at one point, maybe at age 11, it seemed that every shot I put up went into the basket. Then I broke my hand. I was playing indoor soccer as the goalkeeper and I grabbed the ball just as some kid was kicking it, and, I’m not sure if he hit the ball but he definitely hit the knuckle on my pinkie finger and knocked it off. Well, not off, but out of place. I’m glad he didn’t knock it off completely.
For the rest of that season, I tried to shoot with my left hand, and yes got decent, but never great. For some reason, after that, my shot with my right hand seemed to never be the same.
Fast forward to today. In paying attention to emotions for eight years, I’ve also paid attention to my body and how it moves. In shooting, I was playing with different ways to shoot the ball, trying to find the limits. It’s something that I learned from a good friend of mine. I had a friend in Colorado who I think had the Guinness World Record for the longest wheelie in an hour—riding on a bicycle on only the back wheel. He went around an Olympic track 64 times in one hour for a total of 16 miles. When I, flabbergasted, asked him how, he said that when he was a kid, he used to pop wheelies for fun. Sometime around high school, he realized that it wasn’t about staying in balance, it was about how to get back to balance. So he started playing with how far he could go to the right and come back. How far to the left and come back. How far with no hands and come back. Sometimes he’d fall, but if he did it on grass or other places, it would help cushion the fall.
I use this concept of playing with the edges in many things I try to learn. I was trying to shoot the ball from many different angles, turn towards the basket in many different directions, lean in and lean out at different angles. At one point, I had the realization that for many years when I’ve shot the ball, I’ve had it right in the center of my body. The problem with that is that when I bring it up to shoot, the ball blocks my vision. I can’t see the basket! This is actually what defenders do to try to stop someone from scoring, putting a hand in their face! So basically, I was sabotaging myself.
Now I try to make sure I can see the basket with at least my left eye the whole time and things started to fall in place. The shot seems more fluid. For some reason, they just go in more and more.
I describe this because how many times in our lives do we think that we’ll never be as good as we once were, only to realize that if we make a small tweak, we may be even better.
12:40PM
