By Barbara Jorgen Nance
Oscar Wilde said, “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken." The beginning of the year seems to be a good time to ask myself, “How am I juggling my life and am I doing so with passion? Am I being true to myself and my calling? Am I crashing on any rocks of reality?”
We all have a lot of complicated and sometimes mindless energy floating around us. So, how do we harness the positive energy and learn to juggle it to our benefit? If you asked yourself any of these questions, would there be any surprises?
I’m a firm believer in sketchbooks and journals for everyone. Just to jot down ideas and thoughts you might want to ponder at some point. Journals are physical memory banks. Consider doodling. Draw yourself some stick people jugglers and animate your notes. You’ll have fun looking through them somewhere down the road.
I need help with regular memory bank statements. The world today is just too busy to keep one’s thoughts in order. Life can be a juggling act. The juggling character shown above has evolved over the years in my sketchbooks. First a petroglyph, then a deer/elk character after a Lakota Medicine Man I knew told me “to walk like the deer.” Another story for another time. Juggler has no name, yet. I have decided he’s my story teller in a new painting series. How do we juggle the storms of life with ease or balance the cliffs of uncertainty? I have more questions than answers.
It’s good to challenge ourselves at times and take a few risks. Live like you mean it! Yes, risk taking is failure prone. Otherwise it would be called sure thing taking. But sure things tend to be a little dry and crispy around the edges. It’s not that I think we can learn to just juggle life with ease, how boring. The risk-taking warrior and warrioress who juggle life with fearless enthusiasm are the hero jugglers.
So, write yourself a permission slip to juggle life fearlessly, with zeal and passion. Beethoven, even though knowledgeable in all the academic skills of making music said, “It’s not the technique that counts, but it’s the passion that matters.”
Oscar Wilde, Irish playwright, poet and author in the late 1880s said, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” The “some of us” are most likely the passionate jugglers in life.
The last words said by Oscar Wilde before he died were, “Either this wallpaper goes or I do.” We all juggle life until the end, so let’s juggle with passion. Ponder on.