Part 4 of the 20-part Between Mind and Body series

It was gym class. I was in 8th grade and we were about to play flag football.

I was never really the athletic type. But one thing I did know how to do well was throw and catch a football. My dad had taught me early on, and he and I used to play catch all the time. It felt almost like practicing every day, the way I would practice the trumpet. Because of that, my throwing and catching skills were actually pretty good.

At the time I didn’t realize it, but even in a simple game like flag football, people were already forming ideas about each other, quick impressions that often had very little to do with what someone was actually capable of.

My dad had a simple way of explaining things. Throwing and catching a football, he would say, wasn’t really about strength. It was about rhythm and control.

A football isn’t round like a basketball. It’s long and narrow, so the way you hold it matters. He showed me how to place my fingers along the laces, letting my fingers control the ball rather than squeezing it flat into my palm. There should always be a little space between your palm and the ball so that when you throw it, the ball can roll off your fingers.

When you throw, the motion starts with your body, not just your arm. Turn your shoulder toward the person you’re throwing to, bring the ball up near your ear, and take a small step toward your target. Your elbow leads the motion and your wrist snaps at the end. When everything lines up correctly, the ball rolls off your fingers and spins in a tight spiral through the air.

Catching the ball was something he talked about even more.

“Don’t let it bounce off your chest,” he would say. “Catch it with your hands and bring it in.”

He showed me how to open my hands toward the ball and keep my elbows soft so the impact could be absorbed instead of rejected. For a higher pass your thumbs come together to form a small diamond shape. For a lower pass your pinkies come together like a basket.

But the explanation that stayed with me the most was much simpler.

“Catch it like you’re catching a baby,” he said. “You don’t want to drop it.”

What he meant was to receive the ball gently. Don’t stab at it. Let it arrive and give with it slightly so it settles into your hands instead of bouncing away.

Because of those afternoons playing catch with my dad, throwing and catching a football felt natural to me.

But from the outside, that wasn’t something anyone could see.

And when people don’t have the full picture, the mind often fills in the rest of the story.

The gym teacher assigned two students as captains, and they began choosing teammates one by one. I watched as each name was called.

I was picked last.

Quiet. Small. Not exactly what most people imagine when they picture a football player.

As the game started, I stood back and watched the other players throwing the ball. I noticed something right away. Their technique was off. The ball often didn’t go where they intended. Passes were wobbly. There was a lot of fumbling.

I remember thinking, Hmm… their technique is all wrong.

I knew I could throw and catch pretty well. But I didn’t say anything. I just watched.

My guess was that their assessment of me had already been made. Based on my size and quietness, they had concluded that I probably didn’t have much athletic ability.

That was okay though.

I still had fun playing.

At one point I was lined up for the play, waiting for the hike, when a girl suddenly yelled to the guy across from me.

“Watch him.”

She pointed in my direction.

“Those people are sneaky.”

My best guess was that she was referring to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. We had just read about it in history class.

She may have been joking. I honestly don’t know.

But in that moment I realized something interesting.

She wasn’t really seeing me.

She was seeing a story.

Looking back now, what strikes me isn’t the comment itself.

It’s the story behind it.

A narrative had already been created about me, about who I was and what I might be capable of by someone who didn’t know me at all.

And once a narrative forms, it has a strange kind of power.

Over the years I’ve seen moments like this happen again and again. Sometimes I notice it happening to other people. Sometimes I notice it happening in myself.

Recently I had another reminder of how quickly narratives can form.

I was searching through old messages on my phone using the word “massage.” I was trying to locate the names of past massage clients. When you search like that, every message containing that word appears.

One of the messages that came up belonged to a friend of mine who I had worked with years earlier while playing music on a cruise ship. Like many musicians I’ve known over the years, he also worked in other fields when he wasn’t performing, including massage therapy and personal training.

What caught my attention immediately was that the messages were several months old and I had never seen them.

As I read them, I realized what had happened.

My friend had written to me about a dream he had been thinking about for a long time. Every time he gave a massage and looked at a small picture of Mount Fuji hanging in his room, he found himself imagining traveling to Japan and hiking the mountain. Knowing that I had been born in Japan, he thought of me right away and wondered if I might want to join him.

But because I never saw the message, I never responded.

Later he wrote again, explaining that he was confused and a little hurt. From his perspective, it looked like I had stopped responding to him, between a few Facebook messages and now this unanswered text. He said he didn’t know what he might have done wrong, but if I no longer wanted to stay in contact he would respect that.

Reading those messages months later, I could see exactly what had happened.

In the absence of a response from me, his mind had done what all of our minds tend to do.

It filled in the missing pieces.

A narrative formed, explaining why the silence must have happened.

From his point of view, the story made perfect sense.

But it wasn’t true.

What had actually happened was much simpler. His messages had ended up in a folder on my phone that I didn’t know existed because his number wasn’t saved in my contacts. I had never even seen them.

When I finally discovered the messages, I wrote him right away to explain and apologize.

Thankfully we were able to clear things up quickly. But the experience was a perfect example of how easily narratives can form when information is missing.

Situations like this happen more often than we realize. When someone goes silent or stops responding, our minds immediately begin writing a story about why. We may assume they are upset with us, losing interest, or intentionally pulling away. Sometimes we think we must have done something wrong.

But often the truth is something much simpler.

People may be dealing with something in their lives they haven’t shared. They may feel overwhelmed, distracted, discouraged, or quietly struggling with something personal. And sometimes, as in my case, the message was simply never seen.

In the absence of information, the mind fills the gap with a narrative.

And that narrative is not always accurate.

Of course, sometimes the narrative turns out to be correct. Sometimes people really do pull away. Sometimes someone truly decides not to continue a relationship or friendship. And when that happens without explanation, the mind can spend years replaying the moment, wondering what really happened. We search through past conversations, past memories, past signals, trying to solve the puzzle. Without clarity, the story can linger far longer than the relationship itself.

The mind doesn’t like unfinished puzzles.

When something feels unclear or incomplete, it begins filling in the missing pieces. Motives are assumed. Intentions are imagined. Meaning is assigned.

Soon the story feels solid, even inevitable.

Before long we are no longer responding to what actually happened.

We are responding to the story we built around it.

A narrative.

The interesting moment comes when we begin to notice the story forming.

Noticing that moment creates a small space between what happened and the explanation our mind quickly supplies.

In that space something important becomes possible.

We can ask a simple question:

Is this the only story that could explain what just happened?

Because many of the stories we carry through life begin the same way, with a quick interpretation, a missing piece of information, or a moment we never questioned.

Sometimes those stories stay with us for years.

And sometimes all it takes is a little clarity to see the situation differently, or to finally understand the pieces of the puzzle that were missing all along.

What we believed to be the truth may simply have been the best explanation our mind