MAY THE FORCE SPIN YOU

I listened to a podcast today about the physics of throwing a football. Considering I’ve never watched a whole game on TV and only attended a live game once, this is weird.  However, I was spellbound.  I learned that a perfectly thrown football has a tight spiral which forces it through the air faster.  Eventually, it slows down and drops, like all of us, someday.  But while it is up there?  It is a thing of beauty. 

Professionals have long wondered what causes a football to nose downwards as it reaches the end of its trajectory.  It turns out it’s neither gravity nor air resistance but rather its ‘gyroscopic motion.’  That is the tendency of a rotating body to maintain a steady direction of its axis of rotation. So, like us, a football is affected by gravity, resistance, and gyroscopic motion. And, like the quarterback, we need to find a balance between our spiral and our forward motion; too much or too little of either one and we land in the mud.

These same physical forces are at play in our thinking.  ‘Gravity,’ grounds us.  It is our roots and the family and community we came from, that gives us the sense of who we are.  ‘Resistance’ is the trials we’ve gone through and continue to navigate.  When it is too much for us, we stall or sink.  Sometimes, that resistance gives us something to push against which helps us climb even higher.  That ‘gyroscopic motion,’ or repetitive looping mirrors our repetitive thoughts; the ones that act like vinyl records with a scratch at 2 AM and keep us wide awake. 

I wasn’t one of the 115 million people watching the Super Bowl yesterday.  The sheer roughness of the game makes me wince.  I resonate with Andy Griffith’s innocent description of football back in 1953.  “I think the idea is for one group of guys to get all the way down that cow pasture without getting jumped on or stepping in something.”  Truth is we’re all quarterbacks. We all have to make split-second decisions and read the defense right.  We just need enough energy and enough spin to launch ourselves upwards and into the end zone. If we’re lucky, we’ll do it commercial-free and without being tackled.  If we’re not, well, we tried.