Juggling life and being a magician in Ottawa

I am often reading very diverse material, from technology to arts and one recent article really struck me. I've recently arrived back in Ottawa (which is good since I have a few kids magic shows lined up next week :-) and I wanted to share something.

The article was speaking about a juggler who worked for years and suddenly switched job direction. After perfecting juggling why move on to a different domain?

 

One section really struck a chord with me:

 

But then came a guy who wasn’t interested in lying, who wanted to do stuff that was hard because he could. This was his power in the world and he wanted to exert it — the basic impulse of any athlete. Yet he never really found his audience, even though he conquered juggling’s demands like no one before him. Gatto learned how to stand calm and straight-backed beneath sick, dizzying multitudes of spinning, arcing objects and conduct them with model-train precision into his hands. He also learned to charm people, even though it didn’t come naturally to him, as the kiss-the-ball video shows. He gave in. He grew to accept the necessity of kissing the ball and lobbing it gently into the crowd with a grin. He also learned to make hard tricks look hard, to pantomime the exertion and self-doubt of a man working at the edge of his ability even though his ability stretched on and on. He learned to entertain, because for some reason, even though we exist in a physical universe defined by the relative attractive powers of massive objects, the mere demonstration of a lush and lovely control of gravity is not enough. He labored to please an audience that could never appreciate his greatness. Then he got older and watched a new wave of jugglers abandon the stage for the flicker of computer screens, sneering at the bright-light mastery he’d worked so hard to gain.

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