One way or another ‘Juggling’ is something we all do, balancing work, family, social and personal commitments can be a real challenge. So much so, it’s easy to ‘drop a ball’ every so often…

Forties for 40 has had me juggling so many different things that at times I didn’t know if i was making progress or not but when i look back at how far I’ve come, it’s been a remarkable journey.

I originally learnt how to juggle as a child but it’s not really something I kept up with unless the opportunity to show off presented itself (and this invariably led to me putting bruised fruit back in the bowl!).

Like ‘spinning plates’, ‘juggling’ became a metaphor for managing many moving parts at the same time.

Having found I could only actually juggle for about 10 seconds before I made a mistake and dropped a ball, I decided to challenge myself to see if I could last a full 40 seconds – what seemed like a really short time proved more difficult than I originally anticipated.

The main issue I had was maintaining my concentration. Stupid, often completely irrelevant thoughts would pop into my mind or I would start thinking about when and how much I was breathing and even this would be enough to put me off!

Juggling really is a test of mind, hand and eye coordination; you have to control and anticipate where each ball will land before reaching your hand out to catch a ball before quickly throwing it again.

I can juggle 2 balls in either my left or right hand and three halls in both hands. I understand juggling 4 balls is really only juggling two balls in both the left and right hands at the same time and juggling 5 balls is very similar to juggling 3 balls but requires each ball to be thrown much higher to make time to fit the others in.

This challenge is based on juggling 3 balls for a minimum of 40 seconds.

I started out with tennis balls but they were too bouncy and often bounced right out of my hands.

I upgraded to a set of 120 gram Speevers Xballs that are a specific weight and more like a bag than a ball so they fall really consistently and do not bounce upon impact – these helped a lot!

So here’s the proof that I did actually Juggle for 40 seconds, click the link or the below picture – I hope you appreciate the background at least:

https://youtube.com/shorts/xUACz7h4AgQ?feature=share

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