Juggling - Day 1

Okay, as usual, I’ll begin with the rundown of my setup for the month. Since I had previously (very briefly) tried to learn this before, I already had the necessary equipment, “Juggling for the Complete Klutz” and a set of juggling bean bags. Did you know that this book was how the “Klutz” line of fun books started? It’s true. The introduction to the book gives a brief history of how young student teacher taught his class and then printed off 3,000 copies of his lessons and they just kept selling, and “Klutz” was born. A set of three nice, square (so they don’t roll away) bean bags came with the book, and that is what I’ll be using to learn. I had originally tried with 3 different sized and textured hacky sacks, but they started to fall apart and pieces of them were strewn all over my apartment, so I decided I should invest in the Klutz set. My task each day is to set aside 30 minutes and give my undivided attention to genuinely attempt to learn how to juggle. I was a little nervous about picking this challenge as I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it. In fact, I didn’t even decide that I was going to have juggling as my activity this month until after I got home from work today. We’ll see how it goes though.

So far it’s gone better than I thought. I started with just one ball, and the book expects the user to get bored with the simple tossing of the one bean bag back and forth between hands in a matter of minutes, but I think I did that for about half the time. Like I said, tossing a ball around is not something that is second nature for me at all. Eventually I started to get a feel for it and tried their suggestion of doing it with my eyes closed. That did not work. So I practiced with just one eye closed for a while, and then switched eyes. I did okay with that, so I figured I could move on to the next step. I got to use a second bean bag and work on “The Exchange”. I could tell that my form was much better that the last time I had tried to learn this, so I think taking a month and devoting time to it is really going to help me. I definitely have a long way to go . . .I’ll probably just be using the two bean bags again tomorrow, but we’ll see how adventurous I get. So far so good though J