Weekly Wit N' Wisdom

Hate Makes Waste
When Spontaneity Don't.... Serrendipity Do!

My job was to teach Bill Reese to juggle. It turned out Bill Reese taught me more about tolerance and tenacity than any one I've ever known. I first met Bill in 1986 when he and some 17 other wanna-be jugglers signed up for a continuing ed course I taught at Greenfield Community College.

At the time Bill was an ex-marine who looked to be about 60. He had a thick bushy mustache, tight wire rimmed spectacles and stood all of five feet four inches tall. Just imagine a short old guy with a tough leathery face, stocky torso, big barrel chest- basically a human fire hydrant with groucho classes!

You get the picture, an unlikely hero. Who also turned out to be such an uncoordinated hero, that by the third class, when everyone else was successfully exhanging two balls and many were making steady progress with three, Bill Reeves couldn't for the life of him get one of them to land even remotely near his hand.

Just my luck! I have to teach a student who must have been the poster child for the book Juggling For The Complete Klutz! Ah but I wasn't going to give up on him. My first hand experience with frustration had taught me that getting the hang of juggling was just like learning anything else. The formula was 10% talent and 90% tenacity. I had a simple gospel: perseverence pays off. I kept telling Bill that if he just stuck with it, sooner or later he'd not only get good at it - he'd get a great feeling about himself for not being a quitter.

Apparently several of my other students were not so easily converted. And after the 4th week, my class size shrunk from 18 down to 11. Of course with an evening non credit course some attrition is to be expected. ( Especially in a class that centered around a specific skill, people either catch on... or drop out.) Perhaps it's Darwin's law of natural selection, but whether it's the jungle or continuing ed., only the strong survive!

Only the strong... and the stubborn but resolutely determined Bill Reeves. Bill, g-d bless him, who by week 6, when just about everyone else was doing fancy 3 ball patterns with trick throws under their legs and behind their back, still couldn't catch a single ball.

All the same, I had to admire the guy's "semper phi" never say die attitude. I remember one class when he lumbered in with this look of grave concern and announced that the guy he normally drove up with had decided to pack it in. You could almost feel the unspoken question passing around the room. Sensing what was in the air, Bill's response was vintage Reese.

"Yeah, I thought about hangin' it up myself. But I figure why stop now... when I'm right on the brink of mediocrity!" You had to love the guy. Just the fact that he showed up week after week and always had such a postitive attitude made me redouble my determination to help Bill's tenacity triumph. Every chance I got (and there were many) I picked up one of his drops, offered him a few words of advice and gave him a little pat on the back. I kept telling Bill that triumph was just try added to umph. I was in mid mantra of staying patient, keeping positive and having faith that one day soon all his practice would pay off when, to my utter astonishment, Bill Reeves caught a ball. Practically right in the same breath as I said perseverence, he caught another... and another and another.

I had no idea at the time that one day I would be a professional motivational speaker. But I got so pumped seeing Bill's persistence finally paying off that I started coming into class with inspirational quotes. Great lines from writers like Tobias Wolfe who wrote: "We are made to persist. That's how we find out who we are." To which the great greek philosopher Aristotle adds: "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit".

Happily, Bill made a habit of catching one ball and was striving mightily to master two. For my part, in addition to the quotes, I tried to fuel Bill's progress with homespun aphorisms like "when fallibility strikes, fortune sparks". Pretty soon I started making up acronyms as well, trying to get Bill to believe that the letters D.R.O.P. stood for a Daily Reminder Of Patience and a Determined Reinforcer Of Persistence

By now the rest of the class was doing so well that I could just give them a few pointers and for much of the class, they'd be on auto-pilot. Fortunately no one seemed to mind my giving Bill so much private instruction. Several even seemed to get a kick out of seeing the class klutz quickly becoming the teachers pet.

But by the 9th week the contrast between Bill Reese and the rest of my students got to me. Watching the majority of them perform cool tricks with 4 balls plus a few even doing five, then seeing Bill bumbling, fumbling and stumbling all over the place with two, my patience gave out.

When one of the balls richochetted off Bill's knee for like the 2 hundreth time and rolled into the corner, I walked over and put my hand on his shoulder. When he turned around, I looked him right in the eye and said: "Bill, I don't quite know how to put this to you. I mean you've got more perseverence than any 25 people I know put together. Truth is I feel like a prize hypocrite but I just don't think all that stuff I've been telling you about how your patience and practice are gonna pay off is ever gonna happen.

I mean it's not like you haven't tried, and well, let's face it Bill, I just don't think you're cut out to be a juggler. Maybe it's not even your fault. Maybe it's just a hand-eye thing and what you're really meant to do in your middle years is become a sailor or a sculptor."

Bill just kind of blinked back up at me and there was a long silence. Then he slowly removed his spectacles, and for one scary moment I thought the ex-marine was gonna break down and cry. Then Bill's face broke out into this broad grin and he layed a big bulbous hand on my shoulder and said: "Listen kid, I don't wanta bust yer bubble. But when I first signed up for this here juggling class of yours my back was so stiff- I had ta see a chiropractor two times a week. Cost me fifty bucks a pop! Then along comes this here jugglin' course of yours and after just 5 weeks of all my dropping and chasing and bending and twisting and lifting; I gotta tell ya- my back limbered up so good, the last 4 weeks I haven't even seen the chiropractor. Who cares about learning to juggle. I figure just by failing, I'm savin' a hunred bucks a week.. and my back ain't felt this loose in years!"

"Whoops!" or as I now say in Bill's honor, W.H.O.O.P.S.! When Humans Overcome Obstacles, Providence Smiles!