Juggling, the real act of juggling, captures your attention. It doesn't matter if it's varicolored balls or knives and flaming torches. A daredevil element might add some interest and break the repetitiveness--repetitiveness being both the enemy and the point of juggling--but the essential question, what keeps you watching, is whether the juggler can keep it going. It's a kind of narrative, and you want to see what happens next. When the routine gets old, you want it to wrap up with a grand finale. You never want to see the juggler drop his load. Only someone with antisocial tendencies roots for a juggler to fail.

I imagine that for the juggler, much of the pleasure is in attaining a level of focus that transcends thought or feeling, a kind of serene and inner solitude not unlike that to which aesthetes and holy men aspire. And to have it all validated by a rapt and appreciative audience--what could be better, more inspiring, than juggling?

The word juggle, says Websters, dates to the 15th century and has its root in the Latin joculari, to joke, which indicates its implicit delight. In recent years it has taken on a figurative meaning which refers to meeting life's multitudinous demands. (NB: the title of this stylish online magazine you're reading.) Doubtless we use "juggling," and its complementary phrase, "keeping all the balls up in the air," more often in the figurative sense than to describe the actual act.

Figurative juggling is the spiritual opposite of the real thing. It's the burden of inescapable, unending chores, errands, and obligations, a drain rather than a suffusion of energy. It is the driving on behalf of children and aging parents, the maintenance of two or more jobs, of bills and accounts, of managing appointments and planning meetings, and the general upkeep of laundry and cleaning, taxes, investments, insurance, time-share, frequent flier miles, home repairs, 3,000-mile car check-ups, and superabundant entertainment choices that are so embedded in the culture that not to keep up would be an act of brazen retreatism. Although "extra" time, a/k/a "me time" or "decompressing," is not mandatory, it's the goal of getting the others things "finished" (for now) so it counts as one of the balls in the air.

And, unlike the appreciative, eager, and voluntary audience real jugglers get, all that figurative jugglers can hope to get for their exhausting pace is...their kids to school on time.

How we got to this

Is life more stressful or more complicated today than it used to be? It's an economic question, and as with all economics, the answer is complicated and weighted with politics. By almost any objective measure, modern life in the developed world is easier than at any time in human history. Elemental needs such as food, shelter, clothing, and standard amenities such as indoor heating, are largely taken for granted. I don't mean to brush off the existence of homelessness and hunger, but both of those sad realities are still exceptional. On the other hand, it's also true that in recent decades people work more to keep up, and many work more to have more.

"A few decades ago," observes Charles Siegel in the American Enterprise Online, "the typical American family was supported by a man working a 40-hour week. Today, the typical family is supported by a couple working an 80-hour week. Families are overworked because they are overspent. For example, the average American drives twice as much today as in 1970, and the average new home is 50 percent larger than in 1970. Are we better off with bigger homes and no time to spend together in them?"

It's not just materialism, though. For many people, healthcare and eldercare are huge time drains. Many people believe that work itself is more intense than before as companies following a leaner-and-meaner approach expect more productivity out of each worker. For many in those jobs, the choice is not between earning more or earning less, but between making ordinary career progress or being out of a job altogether.

Even so, you can't rule out the possibility that often enough we're pressured by the results of our own individual and collective choices. Take driving. If you live in a less populated area, you have to drive greater distances; if you live in a densely populated place, you sit in traffic. Either way, it takes time to connect the geographic dots of your day. Meantime, dutiful parents provide fulltime shuttle service for children's extramural activities, moving from here to there, and back again, perhaps with a bound volume in hand to squeeze a little reading for the book-of-the-month club.

Organized activities in fact typify Generation Juggler. Forget Johnny coming over to see if Mikey wants to play catch. If there aren't uniforms, refs, and groomed regulation-size fields, the game is off. Some of the mentality that promotes organized play is about getting proper training. Some of it is about controlling the environment, protecting kids from phantom strangers...and from themselves. Either way, we talk independence, but encourage the opposite.

For a parent, free will isn't entirely a given. If all the other kids are in extramural activities, you can hang by yourselves at the empty field--now there's a fearsome notion--or you can add the class, camp or league into your weekly planner.

What juggling does to us

The problem with figurative juggling, as Beyond Juggling: Rebalancing Your Life argues, is that it doesn't work as a lifestyle. "It's bound to break down because it can't be sustained," says Kurt Sandholtz, the book's co-author along with Brooklyn Derr, Kathy Buckner, and Dawn Carlson. "The literal act of juggling isn't meant to be a longterm activity."

Eighty percent of respondents to the authors' survey said they juggle. To keep up, people said, they drink more coffee, sleep less, multi-task, and drive faster. Twenty percent said they didn't take vacation at all; thirty percent that they don't use their allotted vacation time. The signs of breakdown: a constant feeling that you're doing everything but nothing well; a lack of creativity and innovation; feelings of guilt that you're short-changing some key part of yourself or a person in your life.

"There has never been a time in the history of the world when we've had more available to us," Sandholtz says. "Instead of stepping back and saying how can I craft a more sane life, we just run. We see all these attractive things we don't want to be without, so we cram them in. A lot of [the stress] is self-inflicted."

Strategies for change

The question is what to do about it. Beyond Juggling offers five strategies. The idea is to adopt one or two approaches that are realistic for your lifestyle:

Outsourcing. If the laundry is overwhelming, pay a service to do it. The cost of having someone else launder your clothes, clean your house, or prepare your taxes is much less than the hourly rate on a psychologist's couch.

Bundling. Group your tasks to make yourself more efficient. Organize yourself to get more out of each trip instead of seeing every obligation as a freestanding commitment.

Techflexing. Technology cuts both ways, and the stuff that was supposed to set us free has too often done the opposite: wirelessness has created an unbroken cord binding workers to their offices. Make it work the other way, to be more flexible. Learn to shut off the cell phone and to separate out what's truly urgent from what can be addressed later.

Alternating. This is a long-term approach in which people plan long periods of work and non-work. A good example of alternating candidates is the working mother who takes extended time off to be with her family and resumes her career later. It's the most radical of the strategies that the authors propose, and clearly it's not realistic for everyone.

Simplifying. The simplest suggestion might be the hardest for many people: decide what you really need and cut out what you can.

My own strategy is to make a list in order of priorities, then attack it one thing at a time. It doesn't always work, and I drop the ball now and again. I try to be forgiving of myself, remembering the words of an old boss who was raised in a different culture. "Relax," he'd say. "Whatever you didn't do today you can worry about tomorrow."

Todd Pitock does not know how to juggle. His children have had to be content with lesser performance skills such as catching grapes and M&M's in his mouth, though not both at the same time.