What I’m learning from learning to juggle

For several years I’d been wondering what juggling would feel like.

It seemed from the outside like one of those intriguing things that look impossible until you do it – like when I learned to unicycle as a child, or when I first grasped the basic 5 over 4 polyrhythm. Then last summer I found the work of biomechanist Katy Bowman (thanks to Tore) and started thinking about how I could introduce a wider range of movements into my life. I figured that juggling was a low barrier, low cost way to scratch both itches, so I bought three balls and an instructional booklet.

Habit formation
I committed to practicing 2+ minutes per day. I’ve developed several skills and habits that way in the past: making the committment so small that it’s hard to fail, slowly increasing the dosage over time as I build momentum and letting the efforts compound. Over one month of practicing I must have averaged around five minutes per day, and got as far as 10-15 throws in a row. Then my professional life got so intense that I had to pause all nonessential practice. When I picked it up again this spring, I was quickly back where I‘d been, and now I regularly manage 100+ throws, but I rarely even count anymore. Here are a few things I’ve learned or remembered in the process.

The practice teaches you
The first realization was that I did get more movement, but not in the way I had expected. Yes, juggling is an ambidextrous activity. Yes, you move your arms and have to balance in ways you usually don’t. But what regularly made me break a sweat was having to constantly bend down to pick up the balls.

A few focused minutes a day go a long way
This was hardly news for me, but starkly visible in this case. Small, regular bursts of practice, followed by breaks to consolidate the new stimuli to muscle memory. Longer breaks may be beneficial as well:

Pausing for several days does no harm when you’ve practiced correctly
On the contrary:  I was away for a few days recently and didn’t practice, and it only took a day or two to get back to into it. And then from one day to the next I suddenly  got noticeably better. I suspect that such breaks give the body time to consolidate the knowledge and establish a new standard. “Gradual transitions take place suddenly”, as they say.

Repetition gives you the time to notice quirks and biases
Because I had to pick up so many dropped balls in the beginning, I started to notice how I usually bent down, and came up with better, less straining ways to do it.
Another example: I’m right-handed but at one point I noticed I’m often beginning with the left hand. I’ll be paying attention to keep a better balance with this.

Flow happens when you’re slightly out of your depth and getting rapid feedback.
This is something else that juggling confirmed. You don‘t have time to watch closely, so you have to zoom out and intuit the pattern, the gestalt. There is immediate tactile feedback: Catch or miss. You don’t have time to think, and once you can keep the pattern going, flow kicks in.

Feedback is multi-sensory
I realized that auditory feedback plays an important role for me: the ear is much more sensitive to rhythmic imprecisions than the eye. I often first hear a slight shuffle and am then able to correct it. I think the multi-sensory nature of juggling is part of why flow comes so easily.

You iterate rapidly
Each ball you catch teaches you that you can do this, until one falls down, which only teaches you that you made one small error after several successful throws and catches. You can adjust your throws and start to better control the height, speed and direction of the shots. Better throws reduce the need to shift your center of gravity to catch a ball, which in turn makes it easier to throw well. Juggling practice is about stabilizing a system.

Skill levels varies throughout the day
I usually first juggle for 2-3 minutes early in the morning, and when I do, I do it badly. I have uneven rhythm and at first I only manage 5-10 throws in a row. When I juggle during breaks throughout the day I get much more even. I could even read this as a measure of my wakefulness, of the synchronicity between my perception and reaction.

A practice is a break, a break is a practice
Juggling is great for quick relaxation during work breaks. You stand up, you move ambidextrously, you use other parts of your body and brain. Yet it goes the other way round, too: the basics of juggling or almost any simple skill can be learned in small bursts, using your other wake and sleep time to consolidate the new skills and/or knowledge, and form necessary synapses and muscle memory.

So the larger question is, what happens when we think of integrating more of our different abilities, skills and duties in such a complementary way, using one activity as a relaxation from another?

Time slows down as you progress
I  tried to relax and be mindful of posture and breathing from the beginning, but now I can react to stray throws. More and more, you find your hand catching them without you having to look and wihout loosing your center of gravity. You gain time to notice how it feels when your hands catch the ball, and variations in the catching.

Practice is self-reinforcing
You’re improving in two ways: you make fewer and fewer grave mistakes and when you do, you’re more likely to be able to avert them. The fewer bad throws you have to rescue, the easier it becomes to throw the next ball well, which is a self-reinforcing loop. The better you’re getting, the more you‘re motivated to practice. The more you practice, the better you become at getting better.

Again, juggling is about stabilizing a system of feedback loops. A condensed, embodied metaphor for deliberate practice.

So far so good
Take all of this with a grain of salt: I‘m a beginner making first steps and first observations. What’s great with juggling is that there’s an almost infinite potential for gradual complexification. You can develop variations in height, width, directions and all sorts of slight increase in difficulty with three balls alone. This is true for systems in general, which is why juggling is such a useful and kinetic metaphor.

I’m not sure how long I will continue this particular practice, but it’s been a fun, soft physical activity. Juggling is turning out not just to be a physically and mentally engaging activity during breaks, but a great example for designing rewarding learning processes in general – a core issue nur just for us artists.

Spending a few minutes a day practicing and reflecting as I progress has reinforced my conviction that as humans, we’re capable of developing decent basic skills at almost anything with small but regular practice sessions. I will be trying to design other skill practices more in that way. I hope that you can apply these observations to some of your own endeavors. Let me know if you do!

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Image: Fire Juggling by Daniel X. O’Neil (CC BY 2.0)