Juggling

If AI takes my job away, I am going to become a circus artist. So I learned to juggle and learned it as quickly as I can.

I wanted to do it in a month. Things didn't go to plan but I got to a good state in two months. The steps were simple, which I found online. They don't tell you what to do with the hands, only tell how to break it to different levels. How to throw, I had to let my hands and eyes figure out. That took a lot of doing the same things again and again and failing and wait till the magic happen. And it happened.

So now I can go to the bus stand in Jaffna or to some Kovil festival, lay a piece of cloth, juggle and see how much money I can get in a day.

Jokes aside, the real reason I learned to juggle has to do with a concept called Neuroplasticity.

You see, every time you learn a new skill, you add new circuits to your brain. The brain is a neural network. When you learn new skills, you don't update the software, you update the hardware. The more you practice, the more developed the circuits become.

The way I learned this is taking inspiration from artificial neural networks. In artificial neural networks, you give it lots of data and let it figure out on its own. I practiced the same throws again and again and the brain figured out how to do this.

The circutis I trained by juggling are going to help me with many other things. These circuits help with fine motor skills, reflexes, hand-eye coordination, and even the sense of rhythm. So my appreciation of music is bound to improve too. So, you see, juggling is not just a cool party trick. The benefits are manifold.

Persistence (or is it perseverance?) is something else I trained too. I had to let the balls fall to the ground, bent and get them up. I didn't get frustrated. I learned not to have negative feelings. It hurts later in the day from all the bending down to get the three balls hundreds of times. (I used tennis balls. They were all I had. They jump all over the place).

I have been obsessed with neuroplasticity for some time. I do many things like meditation, learning foreign language and lifting weights in order to improve the power of my brain. They are bound to show results in my productivity and general wellbeing.