Did you know what the term is for a group of jugglers is? A Neverthriving. What a mysterious way to refer to a group of people! While that is a fun factoid to have in your back pocket, this essay seeks to draw an analogy from this term to the act of juggling itself. The authors of the Book of Saint Albans may have made it up on the fly in the 15th century, this term is a deep well into what it means to be a juggler.

What makes a juggler good? Knowing where their throws go and when to catch them. It sounds simple, but your accuracy must be exact. And that accuracy and consistency take time to develop. When you see someone who is juggling, it is likely that this is not their first time, unless you see them running all over the place. A competent juggler has tried and failed more times than they will ever remember. But every failure is a reason for the success, because the juggler learned from it. The information given back from gravity is immediate, and it tells you exactly what went wrong.

Because juggling is about throwing and catching things, it deals in the realm of physics. Our brains have the capacity to recognize patterns very well and very quickly. When a juggler makes a mistake and drops, they will are usually able to see why. Either a hand was not where it was supposed to be, or an object moved in a way that the juggler did not anticipate. Most jugglers have a good sense of what happens to objects in flight, but it is not a perfect system, and things like muscle fatigue and environmental factors will play into how much brain power the juggler has when they process those mistakes. If they don’t examine what went wrong, they will likely make the same throw again, and drop again. Until they can see what the pattern is showing them, they will not be able to stabilize.

“Insantity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results” – Not Albert Einstein

The quote above has some truth to it, but by that standard, all jugglers are completely insane. But looking closer, you can see an issue pop up. It’s not that doing the same thing again and again is crazy, it’s when you don’t learn anything from it and don’t grow from the previous attempts that you begin to go crazy. A juggler must always be evaluating the pattern as they practice, collecting feedback from every drop as to what went wrong and how to fix it. Then, the next attempt will be different, not in the action that they are going for, but for the information that has been added to their awareness. If that left hand is too slow, move it faster. If that third throw is too low, throw it higher. These kinds of adjustments are what keep many jugglers, and artists of all kinds, from going to the looney bin.

Learning from your mistakes is the hardest way to learn, but this is learning wisdom, not knowledge. Wisdom is something you can’t teach to anyone, because it is only gained by experience. Sure, you have the knowledge of what the juggling pattern is, and a good understanding of how to make your body move to make it happen, but this is not foolproof. You have to actually make the pattern happen to become wise, to overcome the pitfalls and errors that make for failure.

The English language doesn’t do us any favors in this regard, because we use the word ‘know’ in a very broad sense. You can know how to drive a car, but have never driven one. When people say ‘You don’t know what it’s like…”, they are referring to an experience, usually an emotional state causes by unfortunate circumstances. Or your friend tells you about a new restaurant they found, and you say ‘I know that place’. It could mean that you’ve driven past it and thus know it exists, or that you go there every other week. When we experience something, we don’t say ‘I wise’ instead of ‘I know’, but that is the key difference in what it means to be knowledgeable of an event and to actually experience it.

Now, what does this have to do with the term Neverthriving? Let’s break down the word. Never refers to a view of time, and thriving means to grow lavishly and abundantly. Put that together, and you have a person (or group of people) who are not going to grow quickly. And for anyone who has tried juggling for any amount of time, that is such a wonderful way to put it! While the growth is there, and the improvement is immediate, it still takes time to pull it all together to stabilize.