Jump Start Your Brain. Doug Hall
ties and suits and declared a personal embargo on all nonproductive meetings and paperwork. My office was festooned with a six-foot Bugs Bunny, a humongous Kermit the Frog, two eight-foot cardboard palm trees, and several surfboards. I filled the air with Jimmy Buffett tunes, thought big thoughts, and made them real.
I hear you. You’re saying, “Hey, that’s fine for you. You’re different.”
So are you. You’re different too. That’s the point. Be yourself. Whoever you are.
As we grow up, we become progressively more cautious. We learn not to touch hot stoves and stick our tongues on monkey bars in winter, but we soon begin confusing hot stoves and frozen metal with potential adventures. We fall into deep, cavernous ruts.
We encourage children to reach out to new experiences. We arrange dance lessons, swimming classes, and soccer leagues for them. But we don’t do as we preach. We’re too quick to slap our own hands. As adults, we live predictable, restrictive lives.
ENOUGH! WAKE UP! DARE TO DARE! If you want to grow, force yourself out of your ruts.
If you want to Jump Start your imagination, you have to feed it new stimuli, new people, new experiences. Choke off the stimuli, and you choke off your brain.
Take those first few tentative steps. Here are some suggestions for climbing out of ruts. But be careful—as simple as they are, they can lead to unsettling new levels of stimulation:
1. Be adventurous. Take a different route to work or school.
2. Be adventurous. Buy five magazines you’ve never read about subjects in which you know nothing about.
3. Be adventurous. Buy the No. 1 and number 10 paperbacks on the New York Times bestseller list and read them.
4. Be adventurous. Ask the seventh person you talk to at work to lunch.
5. Be adventurous. Write the numbers of the channels on your TV or cable system on little scraps of paper. Put the scraps in a hat. Pull out a scrap and turn to that channel. Set a timer for five minutes and watch. Pay attention. When the timer runs out, pull out another slip. Repeat until your eyes are bloodshot. Absorb each different world.
6. Be adventurous. Call the family member you have a grudge against—a really long-standing, hostile bout of bad blood—and say you’re sorry and want to start over.
7. Be adventurous. Convince a Rolls Royce salesman that you’re wealthy and take one for a test drive.
You’ll surprise yourself. You’ll discover you like things that you used to know you wouldn’t. You’ll tap into a whole new set of ideas, options, and perceptions. You’ll be taking the critical first step to recapturing your lost spirit of adventure.
The key to becoming an adventurer is in learning to be at ease with two of the most central elements of life—CHAOS AND UNCERTAINTY.
Too many of us have decided we need a certain guarantee before we embark. Or we think we have to know the answer before we ask the question. So we never take the first step. Or the question never gets asked.
But no matter how many travel brochures you read, you won’t know how it feels to stand with your feet planted on the beaches of your destination until you get there. And you most assuredly will never get there until you take the first step. Granted, you’ll be risking failure. At the same time, you’ll be enhancing your odds from “impossible” to “possible.” You’ll also be running the risk of accomplishment.
HOLD IT RIGHT THERE!
You’re not listening. You’re nodding your head, but you’re not internalizing. You know in your mind I’m right, but you don’t know it in your heart, which is where all such knowledge has to be known before you’ll act on it.
Put this book down right now and engage in some off-the-wall act of spontaneity—something that makes your toes tingle and the hairs on the back of your neck prickle. Something that makes your heart gallop and reminds you you’re alive. Step outside yourself.
Can’t Think of Anything?—Here’s an Option
My informal survey indicates that virtually all adults at one time have tossed some tennis balls, apples, or rocks in the air and wondered what it would be like to juggle. However, few have actually learned how to make three objects dance in the air.
Myself I’m a big fan of juggling as a way to de-stress. Because it demands single-minded concentration, juggling is just the ticket for sweeping cobwebs from a tired brain. When you’re juggling, you can’t be thinking about anything else. If your mind wanders, you’re liable to get beaned with a ball, ring, or club.
The purpose of learning to juggle here at this moment is to give you an adventure that feels a little scary but that in truth is not nearly as hard as it looks.
As a life member of the International Jugglers’ Association, I’m sworn to pass the art along to as many non-jugglers as humanly possible. What follows is the method I used to teach it to thousands of folks of all ages while kicking around New England as a performer.
DOUG’S JUGGLING METHOD
(Read entire instructions before starting. If you’re left-handed, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to reverse these instructions.)
Step 1: Find three tennis balls. Better yet, get three bean bags. They don’t roll as far. To minimize spinal stress from excessive bending over, practice over a bed. Or, to minimize runaway tennis balls, situate yourself in a sandbox, on a beach, or in the middle of the Sahara Desert.
Step 2: Hold one ball in your right hand with your arms bent at a 90-degree angle as if you’re carrying a tray. Slide your right hand to the center of your body, right about where your bellybutton is. Open your hand and pop the ball up and across to your left, to a spot just above your left ear.
Step 3: Catch the ball in your left hand. Then slide your left hand to the center of your body and pop the ball up and across to your right, to a spot just above your right ear.
Step 4: Practice the slide, pop, and catch until you can do it without thinking. The ball should follow a sideways figure-eight trajectory. Pop the ball with your wrist up and across your body. Don’t use your arm. Your elbows should not move. A common beginners’ mistake is known in juggling circles as the “stiff-wristed roll-off.” Instead of popping the ball across their body, they roll it off their fingertips causing it to go forward instead of across.
Step 5: Put a ball in each hand. With your right hand, slide and pop up and across. When the ball reaches its peak, slide and pop the ball in your left hand up, across and under the ball in the air. Continue practicing: RIGHT - LEFT - STOP - RIGHT - LEFT - STOP. Now do it the other way: LEFT - RIGHT - STOP -LEFT - RIGHT - STOP. Remember this tempo. When you’re juggling three balls, the rhythm is the same.
Step 6: Now it’s time for partner juggling. Recruit an assistant, lovely or otherwise. Stand side-by-side. Put your adjacent, inside arms behind your backs or, if you and your assistant are on intimate terms, around each other.
• The person to the right puts two balls in his or her right hand and makes the first toss up and across to the left.
• As ball No. 1 reaches its peak, the person on the left tosses ball No. 2 up, across, and back to the right.
• As ball No. 2 ball reaches its peak, the person on the right tosses ball No. 3 across and back to the left … etc., etc., etc.
• Continue popping back and forth until you establish a rhythm.
Step 7: Juggle solo. Put two balls in your right hand and one in your left. Remember to pop each ball up, across, and underneath the ball that preceded it. Always use your wrists.