Leaving gaps

In 1985 there arose, simultaneously in three places around the world, by groups entirely unconnected and completely ignorant of each others’ existence, a notation for juggling tricks. The notation was incomplete, since not every trick could be described, and like many notations, it was not immediately apparent to the uninitiated how to read it, how to use it, or whether it would be of any real use. For those who understood it, however, it was instantly obvious that it was right. Somehow the notation managed to capture the essence of those tricks it described, and the fact that the same notation arose in more than one place at once showed that its time had come, and it was, quite simply, the notation.

Colin Wright

… eventually we hit on a scheme that seemed to work. And we used it to write down loads of different juggling tricks that we knew.
We discovered that if we arranged those tricks in just the right way, they fell into a pattern. There was an underlying, unsuspected structure. As long as you had the courage to leave gaps. And this goes back to things like the Periodic Table, when Mendeley was writing down all the elements—he realized that if you arranged them all according to function, then there were gaps, and that then predicted the existence of chemical elements.

Well, we were predicting the existence of juggling tricks. And it worked! We actually found juggling tricks that no one had ever done before. And when we took these to juggling conventions, people literally sat at my feet for days to try to learn some of these tricks. And months later, at another juggling convention, people from—in particular, I remember going to the European Juggling Convention—and people from America were trying to teach me a juggling trick that I had shown people just a few months earlier at the British Juggling Convention.

Colin Wright

Taken from Notes on Notation and Thought