‘Crisis’ is a strong word. Let’s call it “mid-life concern”. That’s what I entered when I turned 40 last year. Nothing major—no reckless tattooes, or purchases of fast-moving vehicles. It’s just that ‘aging’ featured more in my thoughts, and I tended to think further into the future when I viewed my choices: “What will this mean in 20 years?”

The other day I looked around my neighbourhood hot spot and realised I was “the old guy at the coffeeshop”. At new West Hollywood restaurants my wife and I are among the oldest people in the room—bested only by the out-of-state parents visiting hipster children in the big bad city.

It’s still early, but I’m aware this is the decade in which to get a headstart in that literal, modern-day version of myth of Sisyphus: weight lifting at the gym. An increasing number of reps out of every ten goes into simply keeping you in place. It’s never too late to start sure, but that’s assuming you’ve been at least occasionally checking the oil and kicking the tyres.

This idea of headstarts is what brought me to juggling. Yes, the sport of throwing things into the air and catching them. Wouldn’t it be fun, I thought, to learn how to juggle and issue a video challenge to my friends to learn the same or another trick and hit me back?

Learning a complex new motor skill creates lots of wiring in the brain, both new neurons and new connections between existing ones, and this is supposed to be great for overall brain health. You might say that 40 is way too early to think about this, but there’s another advantage to tasks so difficult that they take all your attention: flow.
Flow—that state of complete focus and immersion in something you’re doing—is said to be key to happiness and well being. Dancers, swimmers, musicians, passionate readers, or friends in a deep conversation are all familiar with flow. When you ask, “Where did the time go?”, you’ve usually emerged from flow. It can be elusive, but learning a difficult new skill is a good way to cheat some into your life.

Complex motor activities

For mid-career family people, it’s hard to think of a better one than juggling (although if you don’t swim, I’d put adult swim classes above everything else). Almost all other complex motor activities need expensive upfront purchases or monthly memberships or teachers or partners or special spaces or certain weather conditions or particular geographical features. Or they have non-portable equipment, or are noisy, or have significant injury risk.

All juggling needs are three balls that cost well under $10, some YouTube instruction, and as much time as you’re willing to give it, even in tiny snatches through a day. So how am I doing? With minimal daily practice (often no longer than a few minutes), I took about three weeks to reliably do a “flash” to the left, then to the right — that’s one sequence of the pattern. With my terrible hand-eye coordination, going from here to continuous juggling, where each throw must be identical, is taking a long time.

That means, of course, that my brain is going at those plugs like a manic old-time telephone operator, learning, unlearning and re-learning like mad. Even so, you have some time before I send out that challenge video. Don’t want to juggle? Might I suggest slacklining or unicycling? Whatever you pick, keep it simple, keep it fun, and best of all, keep it something that you would not expect a person of your venerable age to be doing. #JesterNumber?

Gautam Raja is a writer based in Los Angeles.