Close to your centre

By Daniel Francis

These past few weeks, I’ve been putting in extra effort to get my basketball time in. We all need hobbies in our lives. Hobbies have a way of aiding our mental and physical health without our thinking about it.

Basketball is that hobby for me. I get that needed full-body cardio workout in, and it’s one of those experiences where when I am doing it, I am fully immersed: not thinking about work or life, just in the moment, hopefully enjoying myself because my team is winning.

Recently, I’ve been focusing more and more on my shooting, and this has led me down a rabbit hole of shooting mechanics tutorial videos. I was never a big shooter. I’m quick on my feet and can dribble the ball well, so in most cases it’s simple for me to blow by my primary defender and get an easy layup for the bucket. But I’m not as fast as I once was, and I thought it would be good to incorporate a better shot so I can get more low-effort points in while playing.

During my deep dive on shooting mechanics, I saw an excellent video explaining shooting through the lens of where you hold the ball in relation to your centre of mass.

In this instance, you can visualise your centre of mass as your stomach area. So, when holding a basketball and getting into the shooting motion, if you hold the ball farther away from your centre of mass (away from your stomach), you tend to use more of your arms. When you use mostly your arms, the shot feels more difficult to execute, and often you end up shooting the ball short.

However, if you get into your shooting motion holding the ball closer to your centre of mass (closer to your stomach), you will use your entire body, from your legs all the way up to your arms. This shot allows for a less difficult, more energy-efficient shot.

Think of it like this: if you are holding a 25-pound weight in both arms and you extend your arms straight out in front of you, the weight feels heavy. But if you were to hold that same weight in your two hands but tuck your elbows in and hold the weight against your stomach, it does not feel as heavy. Same mechanics here.

If you are wondering where I’m going with all this, don’t worry, I’m making my point soon.

As with all my articles, I tend to try to find God in everyday life and bring these instances forward to you, the reader. The basketball video had me thinking about the centre of mass in relation to how close we keep God to our centre.

The times in my life where I held God the farthest away from my centre, the more difficult life became, and the more depraved or susceptible to depravity I was. Conversely, the times in my life where I held God the closest to my core were the periods where life felt more at ease because I was consistently reminded that God was with me.

Now, make no mistake, life may not have been easier during those periods of having God near my centre, but just having that close relationship to Him helped create a semblance of ease.

What I’m saying isn’t a big revelation but a reminder. Creating that closeness to God is an everyday endeavour. It’s shown in our daily practices, actions, and even in our speech.

It’s easy to falter and create a distance from God. This, in turn, creates a period of difficulty for us, but luckily, this is easy to fix. Just as in the shooting mechanics where I can tuck my elbows in and hold the ball closer to my centre of mass, we need only bring ourselves closer to God in those moments of distance and keep Him close.

This will eliminate the heaviness we experience, and this will create a pathway for a more peaceful walk through life. We just need to remember to keep God close to our centre. Anybody for a one-on-one?

Daniel Francis, author of The Millennial Mind, The Millennial Experience, and How to Write and Self-Publish Your Book, is an entrepreneur passionate about leadership and storytelling. As a leadership development coach at Rebit Limited, he has spent the last four years equipping individuals to thrive personally and professionally.

He also leads One Momentum Publishing, a hybrid publishing company through which he has guided hundreds of authors on their journey from idea to published book.

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