Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. -Desiderata, by Max Ehrmann

CICERO, Ind. — Orange and brown scribbling fills the storefronts here in the middle of rural Indiana on a warm November afternoon, encouraging words for the hometown high school, Hamilton Heights.

American flags line two-lane Jackson Street, which cuts through the middle of town. Almost daily as a kid, Stu Douglass traveled down this road, over the bridge and through the fields and past the llama farm across from his development.

He’d go on the winding Forest Bay Lane until he stopped at his long driveway to his brown house sitting on Morse Reservoir. At the end of the driveway was a basketball court.

Most associate Michigan junior guard Stu Douglass with Carmel, Ind. — a bustling Indianapolis suburb. To understand him, to reach his roots, go back further.

Go to his childhood, to Cicero, a small, peaceful town, the epitome of small-town America. Stu was the kid with the basketball in his hands, the one who, when they moved from the home after his freshman year at Hamilton Heights, had dozens of lost, long-forgotten basketballs in the tree-lined ravine separating their home from their neighbors.

At the end of the long driveway on the two acres Matt and Nancy Douglass owned sat Stu's most critical childhood tool, a Goalrilla basketball goal. There, the bounce, bounce, bounce of the basketball interrupted serenity.

Two-on-two games between the three pairs of brothers who grew up as close friends, the Douglasses (Stu and Zach), the Smalls (Caleb and Seth) and the Sherers (Chad and Tyler) were for childhood supremacy and bragging rights.

“We’d play the most heated two-on-two games,” Douglass said. “We hated each other.”

“How rough did it get? Unbelievable,” said Sherer, who now plays football at Indiana. “It was actually me and my little brother against Stuart and his little brother.

“… It was pretty fun. How we built up our competitiveness, too.”

Stu fell in love with basketball, as most small-town Indiana kids do. Basketball followed them everywhere, from a childhood AAU team run by Xen Small to the campground in Panama City, Fla., the families’ yearly spring break spot with a temporary hoop from Wal-Mart.

The roughest game of the thousands they played took place there. Who won is debatable. Ugliness prevailed.

“I’d stay out of it,” Douglass’ father, Matt, said. “I didn’t want to see any part of it because they were always yelling. Eventually, they would be picking on a younger brother, too.”

To Stu, basketball is intense. The rest of his life is a cross-section of introspection and understanding. It’s how the kid who ended up at Michigan could have gone to Harvard and why he has the poem “Desiderata,” by Max Ehrmann, framed on his desk in the Ann Arbor condo he shares with teammates Zack Novak and Josh Bartelstein.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Stu Douglass went to his parents one day in middle school and made a bold declaration.

“I want to play in the Big Ten.”

Matt and Nancy were unsure what to do. Neither grew up around college sports or fully understood it.

“I had no idea if the kid is good enough or not,” Matt said. “I have no idea if he can make it and he says, ‘I want to play in the Big Ten.’ I’m like, ‘Seriously? Check the numbers if it doesn’t work, right?’

“But he kept working at it.”

Stu moved out of his local AAU program into a more regionalized team. His parents flirted with leaving the rural community Stu loved, that they all loved, for a chance at something bigger.

On a trip to Noblesville, Ind., where Stu worked with shooting guru Mark Baker, Nancy and Stu stopped at Panera Bread. Two weeks before Stu’s sophomore year at Hamilton Heights, Nancy forced a decision for both the family’s sake and for the academic and athletic interests of Stu and Zach.

“He looked at me and said, ‘Mom, I want to go,’” Nancy said. “Then he looked at me and said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’”

The Douglasses scrambled, eventually renting a home in the Carmel district.

The decision tore at Stu. He left Caleb and Chad behind. As kids they talked about playing basketball together in Hamilton Heights trying to become stars like his older sister Lauren’s basketball-playing friends he looked up to.

“That was,” Stu said, “Far and away the toughest decision.”

Carmel, which looks like a small college campus and all the modern faculties, overwhelmed him at first. It was a long way from the cookie-cutter high school in Hamilton Heights.

He nearly cried his first day there. Eventually, he fit in. Basketball went well. It ended up being one of the key factors why he ended up at Michigan.

“I think about that a lot,” Stu said. “We had a good team, some guys quit with football and other reasons, but it would have been a lot of fun.

“I still love those guys, but I know I made the right decision.”

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.

Stu was a quiet kid. Funny, yes. Popular, sure. But quiet.

He emoted little, aside from the occasional outburst of ‘I hate you’ to his parents on a family trip to Vermont as a 3-year old. He rarely let people in. But he paid attention.

“Always been an intense kid,” Nancy said. “Like he is real even-keeled. The joke was ‘Are you excited, because I can’t tell.’”

Slowly he grew out of it. A year after moving to Carmel, the kid who rarely talked opened up. About everything. Always intellectual, Harvard wanted him to play basketball and had Michigan not offered, he likely would have played there.

He started sharing opinions on politics and the economy. He also picked up another of 
his mother’s qualities.

He started reading people. He learned how to massage people and deal with their problems. He listened, wanting to understand everyone else’s story along with his own.

“Sometimes with my family, when he’s met some members of my family, some of my friends from home he’ll be able to tell,” said his longtime girlfriend, Courtney Boylan, a Michigan women’s basketball player. “Just right away, after meeting them for three minutes he’ll say something about them, and I’ll be like, ‘You totally know. You totally understand them.’

“I was like, ‘What the heck? How did you totally read them that fast?’”

It is a gift — or curse, depending how you look at it.

The gift — he uses it to help teammates and friends. It’s given him a sensitive side when he sees someone who is down. It allowed him to see when people need to be pushed or encouraged.

“I just use it in the way I treat people,” Stu said. “I don’t know, if somebody isn’t always treated the best all the time and you know it affects them and makes them feel real insecure, I don’t know how to explain it.

“I guess I use it every day subconsciously.”

Then, there’s the curse.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Shooters are supposed to always think their next shot is going in. Memories are supposed to be short. Lingering, thinking, dwelling could be devastating for confidence.

Stu Douglass is a thinker.

Throughout last season, as Michigan struggled to a 15-17 record, Douglass had games where he missed nearly every shot. He started the season on the bench, where he’d play decent minutes but none of it felt right. The 3-point shooting that attracted Michigan coach John Beilein to Douglass was absent.

A shift to the starting lineup against Kansas, which Michigan will play Sunday (4:30 p.m., CBS), helped a little. He played almost the entire game against the Jayhawks, scoring eight points.

He found himself a little after that game, scoring a season-high 20 points against Coppin State the next game and starting the rest of the season. But for every 4-of-6 shooting night, he’d have two or three 1-4 nights.

“I’ve tried to think about it, and I just can’t come up with a real definitive answer,” Stu said. “At this time, I’ve surpassed thinking about it, and it’s a waste of energy now. But I tried over the summer, thinking about it.

“It’s just a whole bunch of little things that are never going to be answered.”

He sought refuge with Boylan. They talked a lot, venting about basketball and life as their relationship matured.

For a kid who was self-deprecating from kindergarten on, he searched for anything for answers. Until that point, Matt and Nancy hadn’t realized the pressure of college athletics.

Then they saw their son struggle.

“It’s been hard for him at times to forget the last shot,” Nancy said. “Because as a shooter you have to think everything is going in every time, that it’s got to go in.”

Eventually, Nancy told her son, “Stu, just let go and go play and trust yourself. Enjoy it and have fun. Are you still having fun?’”

Last year he wasn’t. This year is different.

Back coming off the bench, he understands his role. He’s rediscovered his shot, making 42.2 percent of his 3-pointers this season (27-of-64) and averaging 8 points a game as the Wolverines’ sixth man.

Last year, when he doubted himself and searched for anything as inspiration, he looked to his desk. To the frame with the poem his mom gave him his junior or senior year of high school.

The poem calmed him. It reminded him of where he came from, of the sacrifices he made and that no matter what happened on the court, everything else was OK. He put it on his Facebook page.

And he looked to the final line — Stu and Nancy’s favorite line — in “Desiderata,” for inspiration.

“It just puts things in perspective for me a little bit,” Stu said. “When you feel bad for yourself a little bit with these bad things, it puts things in perspective that life is really good.

“Especially in my situation.”

With all its sham and drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Michael Rothstein covers University of Michigan basketball for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at (734) 623-2558, by e-mail at michaelrothstein@annarbor.com or follow along on Twitter @mikerothstein