Juggling

A few years ago, I picked up juggling on a whim. It was a thing. A thing I couldn't do. A thing I wanted to do. I started practicing.

For those that can or have tried to juggle, you know that while it's simple it's not easy. Two hands, three balls, repeated arcs. No complication, complexity, or chaos here. How hard can it be?

Try it. Depending on previous experience and fine motor skills, you might be able to pick up the three-ball cascade in a few hours of practice. That's all it takes: practice and pushing yourself. It took me days of 30-minute sessions.

Some beginners start with handkerchiefs, but following Teddy Roosevelt, I used what I had, where I was. Lacrosse balls, in the basement of my parents' house, where I was living. Days later, I graduated to juggling walks around the neighborhood, chasing dropped balls down hills. A cigar-smoking neighbor said, "Can you chew gum at the same time too?"

I branched out. I bounced balls against walls. I learned to run and juggle, or "joggle." I juggled in tandem with other people. I learned a few three ball tricks. I bought antique, laminated, balanced oak juggling 'clubs' on Craigslist and learned to juggle them without more than a split lip. Eventually, I ordered a set of fluorescent-green molded plastic clubs, which are more reliable, more resilient, and less likely to knock me out. Even more eventually, after a few years, I learned how to juggle four balls.

Over the years, I've learned a few things from juggling.

For one, it's a fine way to interact with and stir up the world. I can't safely chuck clubs around my living room, so I juggle outside, in public places, like bank parking lots. Juggling is an empirically weird thing to do, and people respond in different ways.

Some people are unpleasant. People ridiculed me from the safety and anonymity of their cars. Twice, in the same Pennsylvania college town park, groups of men in cars yelled homophobic slurs at me. One guy ordered me, in no uncertain terms, to get the hell away from his family and his property even though I was on a public road in a neighborhood. I didn't push it. He seemed unhinged.

Most people, however, are amused and warm. Parents bring their curious kids up to watch or play with the clubs. People yell out of car windows, "You're awesome," or "Yeaaaah!" People ask how long I've been juggling and why. Do I do parties? Some take videos of me or with me. I've met neighbors and friends this way.

I've learned that juggling is good for body and brain. It's is a low impact, full-body exercise that also uses your brain. But it's not always necessary. If you're learning a new move, you should focus. If you're juggling patterns you know, you can let muscle memory do the work, go space cadet or take in an audio book.

Recently, I used juggling to grok the psychology of Carol Dweck's work on mindset. Dweck simplifies the spectrum of human psychology into a binary, what she calls the growth versus fixed mindset. Growth folks believe that they can attain success if they work hard. Fixed mindset folks believe they succeed or fail as a result of fixed intelligence, capacity or whatever congenital ability.

If you juggle with a growth mindset, you look at juggling (life) like a game. You toss a bunch of brightly colored balls in the air and try to keep them up. You'll drop, of course. We all do. But you can pick up too, and keep going, and if you do you'll get better.

If you juggled with the fixed growth mindset, maybe you're not juggling brightly colored, happy balls at all, but glass orbs. Even if you have all the balls in the air, you're not having fun, because you believe that if you drop even one, it will shatter. You will have failed, and everyone will see this failure as truth of your internal and eternal deficiency. Or maybe you refuse to toss the orbs at all, just push them along the ground with your feet.

Over the course of my adult life, I've tended towards the fixed mindset and it's end results of paralysis and fear. Even when I had what others might have thought were really bright and shiny balls up in the air, I was deathly afraid they'd fall and smash, revealing to the world the my shame. That led me to play tight.

Trust me. Don't play tight in juggling or in life.

I've dropped a lot of balls and clubs and rings over the years. Once, I landed a club on a bank rooftop. Nothing bad ever happened. A clerk ventured through a window to recover it for me. If I've learned anything from juggling, it's to see drops and misses and failures as inevitable steps on the path to throwing ever more, sometimes spinning objects up into the air over and over again.

We all logically know the truth of this truism. But because I tend towards the fixed mindset, I don't feel it, I don't practice it.

Juggling is a practice. A way to practice the drops and failures and pick up and keep learning. As I strive to see my life and self with more of a growth mindset, I will keep juggling. Eventually, I hope to learn to loosen up, take the failures, and enjoy the game for what it really is.