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Thoughts on a Lesson from Juggling (Kirk Anderson 3/11/05)
Throw, throw, throw. Drop, drop, drop. That's the sound of the first time someone tries to juggle. Some people catch one. A very few catch two. But in all my years of teaching juggling, no one has ever caught all three. And I don't expect them to. Juggling is about failure. A lot of failure. To learn to juggle, you have to fail many many times and still keep on trying. Any time you learn a new trick, you will be picking up a bunch of balls. You will fail ten times before you do it right once. If it's a really hard trick, you will fail a hundred times before you succeed. I've learned enough skills in my life to know that everythng else in the world is like this, but the failure in juggling is just so much more trying. You don't "almost" juggle. You either juggle or you drop. If you drop, you pick things up. Learning juggling requires you to spend more time picking up from your failures than most skills. But it is amazing how much you can learn from failure.
I have been mastering juggling five balls for fifteen years now. (I don't practice much, that's my excuse). When I first started, my only goal was to throw all five balls in the air before the first and second ones got back down to my hands. It was a mess. To anyone watching from outside, it looked like I was just throwing five balls in the air and watching them drop. I had to do that a hundred times before I could even see how they were supposed to be going. I had to fail two hundred times to even see how I was failing. Now, I can see the pattern. I can throw the balls in the right place, at the right height often enough to say that I'm juggling. And more importantly, I know the instant I throw one wrong and can even correct my mistakes quick enough to keep juggling sometimes. I often wonder if there are other life lessons that require you to fail that often before you get it right. What if relationships were that unforgiving and required you to fail that much to get them right? Would I have my heart broken a hundred times before I could see what I was doing wrong? Could I survive two hundred friends leaving me before I could see the pattern and figure out what I was doing wrong? You can see why the idea of reincarnation is so appealing. If it's going to take that many failures before you get somethng right, living a thousand lives would be pretty useful. Thankfully, most of the lessons in life are more forgiving than juggling. Most lessons, don't require you to spend twice as much time picking up as practicing. Still, whenever I fail, and it seems like I do it more lately, I try to remind myself how often you have to fail to learn some lessons.
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