how do i get the beach ball off curser

Reboot.

Open Activity Monitor, Show:>All Processes, sort on CPU%, see if anything using too much CPU% when this happens, click on Memory tab, do you have many Pageouts?

Open Console in Utilities & see if there are any clues or repeating messages when this happens.

When was the last time you repaired/verified your drives with Disk Utility?

How much free disk space do you have on the boot volume? You should leave about 20GB to 25GB free for the OS.

Do a smc reset.

Boot in safe mode then reboot normally.

With respect to understanding the memory behavior shown in your Activity Monitor read the following:

Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used