A parlour trick

All eyes at the dinner table are transfixed by the apple and two oranges tumbling over Jon's upturned palms.

"How do you do that?" asks Shelly.

"This? This is easy," comes Jon's voice from behind the flying fruit. "It's less complicated than what you do every day. I mean, since birth you've been balancing a lot more than fruit. Think about that first moment you breathe air. After nine months in darkness you're bombarded with sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell — all new things. It's a sensory explosion, and your newborn mind is too undeveloped to understand it.

"It's all new information. Faces, hands and toys pop in and out of your field of vision. Then, on that day you reach out and first grab something, everything changes. You become aware of objects. You can grasp them. And you perhaps start to realize that all those faces, hands and toys are things in a space. That the world is not just a series of objects popping in and out of view, but a world of independent objects of which you are a part.

"And what's more, you can control these objects: a ball rolls away with a push, faces smile when you do, and when you're hungry and crying a hand appears with a warm bottle. It might seem like the world of objects is under your control. A solipsistic theatre of cause and effect.

"But they aren't. Some objects don't yield to your push. Others can grab you around the wait and change your entire field of view, and move you from place to place.

"It's probably the first time you see a mirror that you're faced with with an important truth: there's no theatre. You're just another object in a space, and the universe does not extend from your temples like a ray of sense data. You are not alone in this world. And your mind, once the grand theatre of universal truth, is just a pixel in a seemingly endess world.

"That's just your mind. Let's add to this the fact that we are changing constantly. This pixel is not just thinking, he is growing. As bits of the world are broken and ground into mush and spooned into our mouths, our limbs lengthen and fatten; we eat, and drink and breathe, and produce waste, and spit, and tears.

"So while we're taking in this world of objects and information, and finally starting to understand cause and effect, and minds and things, we are also confronted with both the notion that we are whole beings constant in our identity and that notion's exactly opposite, that we are perpetually in a state of flux; that in time every molecule in our body will be replaced by one fresher as we undergo a ceaseless renovation."

Jon swiftly wipes his forehead with the back of his hand, and continues to juggle.

"And language is as complex as it gets. An endless warehouse with no inventory manager. It's no less fragile or malleable than we are, yet is our only link to other minds. Like a rope dangling slackly in our fists, only when it is pulled taut can we certain that our thoughts are heard. That there is a true mental exchange between pixels. The words that we breathe connect our minds, until there is a new thing: an idea. And like our own bodies, this idea is something constantly in flux, yet constant as well. Another balance to be struck.

"These ideas aren't just utterances made my individuals individuals. They are collected, and shifted, worked and re-worked, and fused into grander ideas. And like glass from sand, our ideas build useful notions like culture and politics. We use language to construct social ontologies; concepts that affect us just as our thoughts affect and effect physical reality. With our great numbers we have become awash in social realities, the products of millions of minds working in concert to form a hyper-reality. Once again we must balance the reality of the physical world against an equally complex socially constructed reality. This is not easy to do.

"But this is all we do. We endlessly monitor the notion of ourselves as physical beings in the universe, steady in identity yet ceaselessly changing; we must accept that our grand view of the world is but a small porthole on the side of a enormous ship, and we are just minds amidst other minds, struggling to communicate, and balance the true meaning of our ideas as they too tumble in flux, and moreover as political creatures in a socially constructed hyper-reality to our own; and at the same time have to worry about having enough time to prepare dinner or go to the gym.

"If you ask me, that's truly juggling. The essence of our existence if you think about it."

Jon's chin motioned to the tumbling fruits still turning through his nimble hands, "This is just a distraction."