By Dina Aldabbagh

Sometimes growth doesn’t look like change, sometimes it looks like repetition. That is still very much growth, it just shows up a little differently — a little quieter. Yet, in a way, the mundane repetition is a kind of growth stage that cannot be ignored, and serves a person in an exponential way.

Imagine you’ve just gotten drafted to a team in the NBA. You’re 22 years old, you’ve worked your entire life for this moment, and you’ve made it. It’s June, and you’re not moving to your new state for two more weeks. So what do you do? Who are you in this time? You work on your free throw.

During these two weeks post-draft and pre-move, there’s nothing to “achieve,” you’ve already done it. Really, the work is in the quiet repetition that you do just because it’s who you are. You’ve got to the point in life that the work is no longer to get anywhere, the work is to rep out being yourself so much, over and over and over again, to just establish you so deeply. That’s your work right now, and it’s a little different than what you’ve experienced before, so your body just doesn’t know that it’s safe yet, but you know. 

This isn’t the game, where the stats are taken. No applause is present, there’s no crowd. This is not even a moment where you’re in the gym alone and doing something you’ve never done. You are in the gym right now repping it out — that is: repping out your identity, giving your nervous system practice in being you. Shot after shot. That’s it. It’s not glamorous. It’s just furthering and refining the muscle memory. You’re not even really developing anything right now, you’re just getting more exact. More comfortable. 

You’re getting more exact and you’re getting more practiced. It’s one thing to grow and become, but it is quite another thing to practice so much to the point of mastery — to the point where you are not becoming, you are just being, and being does not require thought. Your body just has muscle memory because you’ve practiced it so many times. This is foundation stuff, and it’s required for what’s next.

You see, you’re going into the NBA —  the work isn’t done yet, but it is very different from what you’ve done. Maybe not so much in content, but in essence. There was the work of becoming someone who could get into the NBA, but what will begin is the work of someone who can be in the NBA. The difference is arrival versus maintenance. Shooting free throws — repping it out — is the process of establishing this identity of someone who is here. 

You are already in the NBA, but your body needs to learn that. It’s spent its entire life thus far being someone who is “trying to get into the NBA,” but you can’t be that person from this point on. You can no longer be the person who is driven by hope, uncertainty, and proving — you need to be the person who knows they’re meant to be here. That’s what this period in-between does.

You’re not actually probably changing anything about your free throw, you’re just practicing it. It’s your identity that is changing here — because your nervous system is changing. It’s becoming settled. This moment is one where your nervous system feels the break from becoming — so that it can learn mundanity. In order for you to stay at the place you worked so hard to arrive at, you must consider this your new normal. This momentary stillness reestablishes your baseline. 

Becoming is exciting. It’s charged. It’s driven by passion. Now is a time that you must be settled. This is how you maintain the place you’ve worked so hard to get to. You see, when you’re so used to movement, you can end up becoming dependent on the sensation of motion. But wisdom is knowing that in all things, there is a time to move and a time to be still. Not all motion is helpful. If your body cannot stay still even for just a second, then momentum is your dependency — your coping mechanism — and it’ll blur the lenses for you to see clearly through situations.

Let’s break it down. If motion, discipline, growth, development, or improvement ever helped you get out of a “lesser” place in life (very likely, as these things have that effect), then sometimes action ends up being a defense mechanism in itself — because it ensures you never get back to “that” place. If you’ve grown at all, there was a past identity you developed through, and there is this one now. This one now is the one that’s more real, but that old identity likely still lives in you to some extent — even if just in a minor way. Therefore, action can become the defense to avoid somehow “slipping” and becoming that person again. 

Action, then, can serve as an extension of hypervigilance. This keeps us safe because if you’re monitoring the situation, you can’t backslide. While yes, firm discipline and action had its role in your life, eventually you get to a point in your process that it’s not meant to be that rigid — because you’ve made it. Eventually, you’ve signed your contract for the NBA. This doesn’t mean that you lose all the habits that made you the person you are now, it just means that you stop monitoring it. Because monitoring yourself constantly takes a lot of energy, and it can make you lose your balance when you’re already standing on solid ground. Hypervigilance looks like being safe, but it’s actually being anxious — and anxiety has a way of putting all sorts of narratives in someone’s head that have nothing to do with reality, yet drive them to insanity and exhaustion.

You’ve already done all the work in becoming the person you are now — developing your mindset, perspective, habits, soft and hard skills, and relationships — so you’ve built your foundation. You’ve practiced your identity thousands of times in so many little ways. You’re here. The NBA already drafted you. But the stillness has its own job to do in teaching you and developing your identity: there doesn’t need to be constant movement around you for you to know that you’re safe. You need to unlearn the fear that you’re backsliding just because nothing is loudly validating you moment to moment, and instead learn that this is what stability looks like. 

When you’re so used to motion, stillness feels unsafe. When motion has meant progress — and therefore good things — to you for so long, then a quiet moment where you don’t see anything happening feels like things have turned for the worst. It makes sense. If you’ve been the driver of every good thing in your life for so long, then to take your foot off the gas would feel like giving up. But really…it’s something completely different. You don’t have to see everything moving for you in order to benefit off of it — because you’ve gotten far enough in the process.

At some point, all the effort you’ve invested compounds and your investments start working for themselves. Your life no longer needs constant surveillance in every area, because you’ve already built the systems. Things are maintaining themselves now. The shift that’s taking place in a moment like this is your nervous system is learning that taking your hands off things is not unsafe. This is crucial, because going forward you’re going to need your energy for other things. While you may have spent so much time creating the foundation, it was always meant to be completely integrated so that you could use your hands to work on other things. 

And you’ve gotta learn this now, because otherwise, when you get into times of having more — everything you could ever want — you may feel like you still have to monitor all the little things that you’ve already grown past just to maintain it, instead of just recognizing that you have it because it’s your identity. 

If you feel that unease in those quiet moments when there’s logically nothing more to do, then you’ve already gotten to the point in life that the work is no longer to get anywhere. The work is to be. To maintain. Maintenance doesn’t look quite as exponential and glamorous as that initial growth. It’s much slower, quieter, and constant. It’s also much safer, because it’s stable. Sometimes, reality is ahead of our bodies and our bodies need to process truths we already consciously know. Shooting free throws in a quiet gym is just your body learning that it has already built the foundation for the rest of your life. It can stop running towards more, because more has arrived. 

The stillness — that pause — is a blessing. It’s allowing your body a moment to catch up to its reality. Without that, you may form beliefs that stop you from ever really experiencing peace, and make you look at consistency without loud results (still growth) as boring or as failure. If all you know is progress that looks like exponential growth, then that’s all you’re going to think life is and is meant to be. But life is meant to be lived, not just a thing you’re constantly trying to achieve. The point of the work to get here was to be here. You need to learn that this peace — this stillness, this commitment to a calm life — was always the point. Self-improvement isn’t the point anymore. 

Think of the land of milk and honey — the Promised Land. In the Bible, God brought the Israelites out of Egypt, but then he had to bring them to the Promised Land. The thing is, there were several processes at play here. In the 40 year journey from Egypt to the Promised Land — i.e. Canaan — the Israelites had to detox the identity of being a slave. The actual geographical journey wouldn’t have taken that long, but the Israelites repeatedly doubted and rebelled against God, making the journey a lot longer. A key detail is that spies were sent into Canaan, but they returned back to the group afraid, saying the people of Canaan were stronger than them, so the Israelites refused to enter the land. They felt inferior, and therefore at risk.

God may have brought them out of harsh times, and even to a good place, but there had to be shifts in identity in order for them to be willing to enter. That’s the 40 years: the identity shift from being slaves to being people who wander in a wilderness. However, there’s an important part about getting into Canaan I imagine being crucial to the process: God had to change the identities of the Israelites from people who wander in the wilderness to people who are in the Promised Land. That’s huge.

If all you know is the experience of “getting” somewhere, then you need to learn the experience of “being” there as well. It’s like walking to a far destination. It’s so far that you must learn to be accustomed to the process. Of course, along the way you have to learn to love walking, because that’s the only way you get through such a long journey. But when you get to the Promised Land, don’t forget that you were doing all that walking to get somewhere. That work is done. It doesn’t mean life and work is over; work continues and things need to be developed, but it’s different. It’s a life of maintenance at the top versus clawing your way from the bottom. You will still be growing, but from a place of “already enough,” not from “need to secure it.” 

The danger of being unaccustomed to stability is that you mistake it for stagnation, naivete, or the calm before being blindsided. When you don’t hear something constantly, your voice fills the space. And if nothing is saying to you in that moment, “You are safe,” then your voice starts questioning the security of everything in your life.

This is why God needs to teach your body how to feel safe being still — because if it always needs something to be moving, it will create problems of its own. Simply put: if you depend your sense of safety on constant validation — which is impossible in a human world — then you will take every moment in which something is not validating you as something being wrong. 

However, when things aren’t always moving so visibly, in loud ways, it may just be because you’re already stable. Nothing else needs to be done for the moment. Yet if you don’t see things rushing around you, and think that means there’s a problem, then now you’re putting yourself through a negative experience just because you don’t understand that this is peace, and it’s already safe.

Essentially, if your nervous system doesn’t know that it’s safe, then even after all the work that it’s taken to get here, you can still perpetuate a life of worry, shame, guilt, and unsettledness. That’s not for you. Peace is for you. 

So that’s why right now, even though you are still making movement, and a lot at that, it’s a calm and quiet movement. It’s repetition. And that’s a different kind of exponential growth, because it’s a kind of exponential growth that literally looks like nothing is happening day after day until the identity just locks in and suddenly you are completely changed. Suddenly, your identity has now come so far, too far, to ever go back. It is completely integrated, completely natural. It is greater than worry and shame. It doesn’t question itself — because it is comfortable. 

That’s what it is to be shooting free throws. It is a blessing to be at a free-throw line. You may have spent a lot of time trying to get to the NBA, but the draft is done. The contract is signed. You know what your future looks like. It’s secure, even if all the details aren’t exactly certain. Even if you don’t know what all your teammates are going to be like, when someone will get drafted to another team, or which games you will win and lose — even though you don’t know how your career is going to go — you’ve secured it. You just know you’ve made it. And now begins a very different kind of journey.

You are no longer trying to get to the NBA, you are here. And all you’re doing now is showing up at the free-throw line and practicing, over and over again. You’re not trying to show off to anybody. You’re not trying to become anything different. All you’re doing is practicing who you already are.

The mundane repetition of the “same old, same old” you’ve been doing for a bit — where things are good, and there’s no obvious area of life to improve — is the part of the process where your identity is stabilizing. There will come a time for you to grow more — for you to do more becoming — but the whole point is that that season hasn’t started yet. Yes it is all secured, and you’re already on the team, and everything is done — but the season hasn’t started yet. 

Come the moment for it, you’ll undergo a new type of growth — and it’s going to happen when it needs to happen. It’s going to be the growth of learning the flow of the team, how to work with your teammates, and how to be a leader. But it’s not the type of growth you’ve spent your entire life on thus far — which is that of having this deep belief in yourself, knowing you can get somewhere, and working so hard to become that thing in order to secure that future. Because now the future is already secured. There’s no question. 

So for now, while you’re metabolizing your new baseline, just let yourself be at the free throw line. Enjoy the quiet gym at 10 pm, when no one else is there. The noise will come again, things will eventually move fast, but take this moment to yourself. You’ve arrived. Shoot your free throws — not because you need to, but just because it’s who you are. You’re an NBA player.