Sunday, March 28, 2010

Juggler, Juggling, Balls of Rubber and Glass

Imagine yourself to be a juggler juggling in bare foot. Keep in mind - bare foot on a hard cement floor. You got 5 balls to juggle. They are - work, family, friends, health and spirit.

Of the 5 balls, work is made up of rubber. Rest of the 4 balls - family, friends, health and spirit  - are all made up of glass.

While juggling these balls, if you miss the work, it will hit the ground. Since it is made of up of rubber, it will bounce right back. But, if you miss any of the balls made of glass, they break into pieces and it won't be fun to juggle while stepping on the broken glass on a hard floor. Once any of the glass ball is broken and starts hurting your feet, even if the rubber ball (i.e. work) keeps bouncing back, you can not pick that up again and continue juggling.

Moral of the story is take care of the glass balls carefully and the rubber ball can take care of itself. It will keep bouncing back up all the time. If you need more time, give it one good smack and it will keep bouncing back up again and again till you finish juggling other balls. This is not to say that you should ignore your work. Work smart not just hard.

Another possibility is to get out of the juggling game. Or keep lesser number of balls in air at any given time. Delegate a lot of work so that you only have to juggle 4 glass balls. Looking at 4 glass balls, actually only one is really unpredictable. That is family. Rest three - friends, health, spirit are actually easy to juggle if you keep plugging along. Unpredictable things happen mainly with family stuff. With friends, we have a good understanding and protocol. So, you can manage friends well. Health is the easiest to juggle if you stick to basics and firmly believe that prevention is better than cure. Spirit is also easy. It will come on its own when time is right. So, basically you have two major balls to juggle - one is work and the other is family. With only two balls, it should be simple enough.

Many times we do not see all the five balls this way and start juggling mindlessly even when they do not need to be all juggled at the same time. In the process, we drop work. Worse is we worry as though we dropped one of the glass balls even when we know that work, being made of rubber, will bounce back.

Key take always  - ball made up of rubber will bounce back. All glass balls are not equally hard to juggle. Family is probably the hardest. Health is probably the second hardest. Friends are easy if you have good ones. Anyway, you do not want to have bad ones. Spirit is the easiest. Do not even worry about it. When the divine grace smiles on you, you will know how to juggle the ball of spirit without even  worrying about it.

Cheers to juggling!

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