Many of us are struggling and in survival mode as it were to prevent a number of our juggling balls from crashing down around us, and, especially since we'd rather just hold and admire a juggling ball from time to time, it can seem like there's no end to all the trouble that it comes at us from every which way - political, social, personal, certainly does not help.
For reference: the juggling balls are very personal requirements. I am speaking here of social, physical, spiritual needs. These are the pillars of a healthy, fulfilled, joyful life. Somehow though, they are always shifting and moving, and require continual maintenance or juggling.
Some of us have even opted for a simpler, bare bones existence to counter the problem. We sit with one of the juggling balls to make the most of what we have because somewhere along the line we've been confronted with the idea that it can all be taken away.
Take Romance for instance. This is one of the juggling balls. Wouldn't you like to sit with the one you love for a while and let their presence sink into you like an essential oil?
OR take Health, which is arguably more foundational, but by no means a replacement for Romance. Wouldn't you like to spend the day taking care of your shattered nerves so that you could look after the one you love too (for instance)?
Well now, life seldom stops to take note of our needs. We get worried we're losing out on a full life - usually focusing on one aspect of our needs to the exclusion of all others; - we think a lot; we get wistful, even sentimental about holding that one juggling ball - be it health or finance or social life, and WHOOMFFFF! We've hesitated too long. Another juggling ball screams at us to keep the show going. Another life goal missed, another exhibition of our impotence. It threatens to hit the floor. It might be as simple as our laundry not being done, which translates to losing face at work because of stinking to high heaven.
Ergo all juggling balls are connected in a network and can potentially cause each other to fall. It might be a person we forgot to reply to... It might be a client we don't want to deal with... Or some chronic health issue.
The point is, life is overwhelming at the best of times. We're scarcely clear of one obstacle, when another presents itself and we seldom seem to have the slightest chance of beginning to understand the full picture of life in all our days here on earth. This is a very human phenomenon across the timeline of humanity. We are all failures in a certain sense. The question is how drastic the failure is..
We just don't quite get to the full picture here in our terrestrial, flesh-bound existence. Hence the metaphor of juggling. Juggling is more of a blur than a picture. Indeed when we try to zoom out a little, it's almost as if life's present concerns, especially the petty ones are are expressly here to stop us from considering the larger juggling ball - the juggling ball of life as a whole.
This is God's juggling ball so to speak. The place where the earth meets the heavens. It's also every one of our life's juggling balls encapsulated into the giant ball of our life. It's also the world's (all peoples' on earths') juggling balls as a whole.
So that's where we've come to now. We're on the topic of our juggling ball as a metaphysical construct encapsulating all our days.
While we're here, we might as well admit it. We seem to think God is slow in getting to as he juggles the universes' infinite balls and knives and batons. This is how deism came about. Some have thought that God has left our collective juggling ball - the human story - to gather dust and play itself out like an unwinding clock. But the truth, one way or the other, is that we just don't have a map of our life that's full or sufficient, or even part-ways to being sufficient so that our lives can improve.
There is one possible way to manage this problem, even if we'll never fully combat the disease. In the modern day all of this complexity has compounded and has become truly astounding. There is one advantage to this though. One thing has become clear in the extreme: We're so busy wrestling with our wants that we don't stop to consider our needs. We get our brains overstuffed with the things we think we need to the exclusion of a better and even decent life. People are not suffering and fighting each other over needs but rather wants. We have so many resources to see to our wants that this effulgence of new wants has become the new battleground.
And this is in conclusion, perhaps the problem with the modern world: We're so surrounded by wants that we don't consider the foundational characteristics of a normal, balanced life. We are pushed further and further away from having a chance to consider God's juggling ball as He sees it. AKA our life in some form of totality. So we inevitably blame God for not taking care of us or our life. Be he Jungian or fully literalist Christian, it does not matter for the purpose of this discussion. The point is, we think He's forgotten us. Whereas in truth, we're lacking in a higher wisdom and basic picture of our needs. One of these needs - one of these juggling balls so to speak - is indeed talking to God. But if we don't act on his suggestions about the bigger picture, that's a truly cardinal problem.
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