Kemba Walker Celebrates A Missed Shot, Embodies Human Condition

Oh Kemba Walker will be seeing this on highlights for all the wrong reasons for a long time to come. — Will Manso (@WillManso)December 30, 2016

Think of a moment when you were feeling yourself, when you felt smart or confident or successful or unique. Maybe this moment came on a basketball court, but it's more likely that it happened at a party or under the humming shitty lights of some work setting or in some conversation or other; it may have happened on social media, although you'd probably do well to keep it to yourself if it did. Either way, wherever and however, that moment almost certainly did not afford you an opportunity to shimmy with delight afterwards. Of all the benefits that come with being a professional basketball player, the adulation and wealth and the moments of true and transcendent physical mastery, there is also that—if you do something cool, you are welcome to shimmy on it.

Are there risks to this? There are absolutely risks. If you are too purely lost in self-belief and too innocent of doubt, you might begin your shimmy too early. You might believe that, because something feels right, it must in turn be right, and you might believe that so much that you slide into your proud shimmy in the very moment that you are proven wrong—wrong in your sense and wrong in your belief and wrong in starting that shimmy. It is probably not any consolation that you do not see the proof of this as you wiggle away; you're still wrong, whether you know it or not, and there's no hiding from that knowledge forever.

But is Kemba Walker wrong, here? Is he wrong to let the ball go, trust in the purity of his game and his sense of his game, and proceed directly to the shimmying? In one sense: yeah, dude is definitely wrong. In another sense, Walker could not be more right to shoot, turn, shimmy, and leave Cody Zeller to bat at the disproving rebound that he made. It is a good thing to know your limitations, and a bad thing to be bowed or bound by doubt. It is good to check your work, but it is also necessary to trust and believe in yourself. We miss, and we make mistakes; we fail and fail again. The knowledge of that can be heavy, and we cannot ever quite shake free of it. But we can shimmy in our chains. We have to. There is nothing else to do.

The mystics have long known this.

It seems worth bearing in mind, at this moment and also at every other one.