This is a response to the discussion initiated by Tim Stakland at timstakland.com.
My dad made a point of frequently reminding me during my time as a Mormon missionary that life as a missionary is simpler and more focused than any other time. This isn’t to say it’s easy; but without bills, emails, classes, or many externally-made scheduling items, you are free to pursue your duties with a singleness of mind. If life were a ball game, you seemed to be receiving just one pitch at a time. Since the mission life’s complexity has built layer-upon-layer: two to three jobs at a time while being a full-time student, a leader in the local church congregation, preparing graduate thesis, research, and PhD applications, and having all the financial, social, and personal stresses of having a wife and child. My running TODO list is usually dozens of items long. It seems the game of life has changed from soft-ball to being the last target standing in a big game of dodgeball.
I recently started started juggling; we made our own juggling balls from baloons and rice and took to the hallway with my 2-year old. The move was action on a long-standing urge. The principle of juggling as a metaphor for dealing with the complexity of life seemed obvious and appealing: to take “more balls than hands” and to reduce them into a single, balanced pattern. To do so requires steadiness, some dexterity, and above all, balance. One of the beauties of the result is that once the principle becomes internalized, adding additional objects to the juggle requires only a little adjustment of the already-understood motion, and changing the pattern of the juggle for novelty or to adapt to change (like people stealing and adding more items) becomes possible.
The minimalist movement of the 2000s (exemplified by design teams at Google) might advocate simplification by reducing the number of balls to as few as possible, which certainly has its merits. But for the swelling complexities of my life I’ve found the metaphor of juggling as applied by “More Balls Than Hands” author Richard Gelb, and thereby honing the principles of balance, optimism, and mistake-admission (“dropping the ball”), to have immediate benefits and long-term promise.