Juggling as a metaphor for life

Question #1 - Guess who now has three balls with which she’s trying to keep two in the air at any given time? Me, that’s who. Yes, I proudly purchased three balls designed to withstand an adequate amount of use throughout varying environmental conditions over several years.

Question #2 – Guess what builds up quad muscles and helps to stretch out hamstrings? Learning how to juggle, that’s what (all that bending-over to pick up dropped balls.)

This is not my first attempt at learning how to juggle. I’ve read several online “manuals”, complete with drawings, on the subject. I’ve asked the MRF Juggling School plus several other free-lance MRF jugglers for the secret and hopefully quick+surefire method to learning how to juggle. I’ve even paid a guy $35 to learn how to juggle. A co-performer also paid the same guy $35 but it actually worked for him.

Here’s the part I have difficulty with: just exactly how am I supposed to catch these balls without looking where they’re going to land? Do you ever see a juggler looking down at his hands? No. I find this incredulous. How can you possibly know where these balls are going to land? You don’t! Sure, you can assume that they’ll land in your hands but you don’t KNOW that they’re going to land there. I could trust in differential and quadratic equations of trajectories and hope these are correct but how do I know they’re correct all the time? And further, which equation should I go with? What if Galileo was wrong?? WHAT IF HE WAS WRONG?? Then I’ll never catch those fucking balls!

There are far too many factors involved in knowing for certain where the damn ball will land. I’d have to estimate the launch velocity, launch angle, trajectory height, and the positions of the launch and landing points. I can’t do that all in a few seconds. I can’t even do that all in a few days.

Wikipedia has a cute little animation showing a stick figure juggling 3 balls in what I believe is the common beginner’s pattern. I could also mention here that it is referred to as a Siteswap 3 but part of me feels that term was added to the Wikipedia page by some professional juggler in an attempt to get the newbies to repeat a silly sounding phrase. I would like to point out the lack of environmental factors in this animation like wind velocity, differing weights of the balls, and surrounding distractions. I also think this page illustrates how we can be fooled by the internet into thinking life is much easier than it really is.

Supposing I could decide on a calculation that I trusted, I would then have to contend with Zeno’s paradox that motion is an illusion. In order to move from point A to point B, I would first have to throw the ball half way, but in order to reach that half-way point, I’d have to get the ball half-way to the half-way point. Because there are an infinite number of points to cross before getting to Point B, I’ll never actually get around to throwing the ball up. In fact, I’d never get around to picking the balls up because I’d have to bend half-way, but first I’d have to bend half-way to bending half-way….oh nevermind.

Louis Pasteur said that “chance favors a prepared mind”. It seems to me that catching a ball would favor a prepared hand but I can’t figure out how to prepare my hands for this.

I think there is a secret mind-control method to juggling. Jugglers have learned how to make the balls go where they want purely with the power of their minds. Microscopic laser beams are coming out of their eyes and directing the balls where to go...and then Satan is making sure the balls land in their hands.

Juggling may be the cruelest trick to play on an obsessive-compulsive person. I really want to catch the balls RIGHT NOW but I want to know exactly how to catch the balls RIGHT NOW. I think the stupidest thing I ever did was to purchase three balls designed to withstand an adequate amount of use throughout varying environmental conditions over several years.