I get so lazy, I can’t even sleep.
(I hope no one recognizes that song).
So, instead of actually writing anything, I am going to post a column I wrote for the paper.
Tada.
Out clubbing, juggler’s style. Part one
By Luke Eden
Until just a few weeks ago I’d never really met anyone who was a better juggler than I am.
I don’t mean to sound self-sure or egotistical in this; I just hadn’t met anyone who seemed much interested in juggling. While this may not seem extraordinary to most people, I found it quite intriguing.
One of the things that has surprised me since I’ve started juggling is the number of people I’ve met who can actually juggle. This is not a large number, by any stretch of the imagination, but still, whenever I am juggling in a crowd, there will be at least one person who can do some basic juggling.
As I have mentioned before, the basics of juggling are quite simple, and anyone can pick it up with a little patience and an hour or two of time. Not many people, though, ever go beyond this initial investment. That’s understandable; it’s easy to feel as though you’ve peaked and advanced as far as you can with the thing. (If you would like to learn the basics of juggling or pick up some new tricks please don’t hesitate to contact me at luke@dogfishjuggling.com).
When I first picked up a set of juggling balls, for months I juggled in a simple, stagnant pattern. I didn’t know any tricks and couldn’t really imagine them.
Eventually, though, I started poking around on the Internet, learning about new tricks and patterns and watching videos of some truly phenomenal jugglers. That’s the time when things started to turn around.
As my thinking about what juggling was and what I could do with my props began to evolve, my juggling slowly followed suit. I began to be more and more aware of my patterns and what was actually going on with the balls as I juggled them. And as I began to become more and more mentally invested in my juggling, something strange began to happen. I began to have what I can only call juggling epiphanies.
There is no question about it when they hit, and the more I juggled, the more epiphanies I seemed to have.
I’ve heard athletes describe the sensation of “being in the zone,” a feeling as if time has slowed down and you are in perfect and absolute control of everything around you–As if, to borrow a phase, you’ve “stumbled into the vector of wisdom.”
This is what a juggling epiphany feels like: a moment when you can see the pattern in your mind and bring it into being before you–when your props hang in the air and you can feel the weight of them linger in your hand and you know that you can do something new.
Once you can feel that space, a whole new world of tricks opens up. And once you do those tricks enough, you start to feel more spaces, and then it becomes a matter of figuring out what you can do with those spaces.
This has been my experience with juggling, and it is why I have found it such an engrossing hobby.
Yet, as much as I’d advanced on my own, I had never met anyone who shared my interest, who’d pursued juggling beyond the most basic of levels. For eight months after my first real juggle, I was the best juggler I’d ever met.
Saying “all this changed” after I went to the Atlanta Juggler’s Association’s Groundhog Day Juggler’s Festival would be putting it mildly.
At the festival I saw a whole world of juggling I’d never imagined–patterns I’d never seen and tricks I still can hardly believe. But that will have to wait for another day, another column, and part two of my Groundhog Day Juggler’s Festival coverage.
(Readers overly concerned with the happenings of the juggling festival will be pleased to know that part two of this column will appear in next Saturday’s edition of The Press-Sentinel.)