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Juggling? Seriously? Why Juggling?

I’m so glad I decided to pretend you asked!

Yes, one of my Goals is “learn to juggle”.

I am a generally clumsy person, and my vision is poor. When you’ve got bad hands and bad eyes, any attempt at coordinating the two is a goal on par with nailing Jell-O to a tree.

I’ve always avoided embarrassment whenever possible. In high school, for example, when my friends played Hacky Sack, I sat nearby and chatted. That’s fine. I was socially awkward anyway. Being the odd one out yet again was no big deal.

In elementary school, gym class was predominantly team sports. Sure, we’d do the occasional unit of gymnastics or track and field, but 80% of the time it was volleyball, basketball, soccer, or some other activity based around an object being passed through the air to be intercepted elsewhere and redirected.

Being clumsy, I could not intercept.

Having poor vision, I lacked the depth perception to accurately redirect.

In the eighth grade I spent so much time sitting on the sidelines (ostensibly keeping score, because anyone who said winning wasn’t important was probably on the team we all knew would lose) that I failed the course.

Yes, I failed phys ed.

I don’t actually care if I can juggle. It’s a novelty, not a marketable skill. But if I can learn to do it, if I can keep three small objects bouncing around in the air, controlled by my clumsy hands and monitored by my unreliable eyes, then I’ll have proven to myself that my lack of coordination is not as incapacitating as I’ve allowed it to be.

I doubt it will come easily to me, and it’s not as though being able to juggle will suddenly make me good at basketball (or bring up my eighth grade GPA), but it will be a personal victory. It will also mean I can never fall back on the easy out of being uncoordinated. It will mean I can’t back down or run away. I can’t sit on the sidelines just because something doesn’t come naturally to me.

Just because it doesn’t come naturally doesn’t mean it can’t come at all.

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