Standing Up for Sisyphus

I’ve been thinking more and more about expanding and contracting lately. I seem to get fuller with each expansion. I’ve grown a lot in the last three months. I can feel that I am a different person, and right now I feel like a stronger, more capable person.

I can’t remember if I wrote about this before and I’m feeling really lazy right now so I’m not going to bother to look, but some time last month I was walking back from the grocery store with my groceries. I live uphill from the store, and had gotten a little more than I had set for. I thought it would be easier to go up Ingersoll, which slopes gently up to 42nd as opposed to the steeper single block up 34th to Grand, but I had really underestimated how steep Ingersoll actually is.

I’m not a very physically active person. I take a lot of walks, and I do some yoga on rainy days, but my watch has long since given up on me. Also, the day was a lot warmer than any day in March has any right to be. Needless to say, I was laboring to make it up Ingersoll.

Usually when I find myself doing something strenuous, like actually sweating and exercising, or carrying something heavy for a distance, I start thinking about how weak I am, how I’ve always been like this, yada yada yada. The self-hate factory operates 24/7. I usually distract myself from it by ruminating about something. I would say that one of my biggest take aways from hiking in Boys Scouts is that sometimes you just have to endure. The 20 mile hike will be over eventually, and all you will have seen will have been 20 miles of corn fields and drainage creeks. In the meantime, your mind is free to move about the cabin; your body’s got this, one foot in front of the other, follow the backpack of the boy in front of you.

Camus wrote that we must believe Sisyphus to be happy. Sisyphus was a serial rule-breaker who got away with everything. His ultimate punishment is to be trapped in a loop like Groundhog’s Day, laboring to push a boulder up a mountain all day only to see it roll back to the bottom each time. There is no escape, no way out. Just pushing the boulder up, and then watching it roll all the way back down. Over and over again.

But there is one way out, argues Camus. The purpose of the punishment is to make Sisyphus feel bad for his previous actions. But if Sisyphus is happy, then he is once again escaping his punishment, just as he always has. How can Sisyphus be happy?

Because one’s happiness is determined by one’s view of the world, which is subjective, which means it can be changed. Happiness is a choice, a conscious act. By choosing to be happy, Sisyphus escapes punishment. He’s still stuck in the loop, but in a sense, so is everyone else.

I finally reached the plateau, where Ingersoll levels out before running into 42nd. I set down my bags on the sidewalk and stopped to catch my breath. I looked around as I took some deep breaths. I’m still trying to learn the neighborhood. I realized that I was standing up straight. I usually stand with a slouch, curling my shoulders forward and inward, the posture of someone who’s masking and is trying not to take up space, trying not to be seen, someone that I no longer need to be.

I’ve started standing up for myself. That is an interesting feeling. Somehow, I feel more secure with myself. I guess this is what I meant when I said that each expansion I’m feeling a little fuller, a little stronger. More capable. Standing up straighter, not because someone’s telling me to, but because I’m no longer concerned with not being seen. I’m tired and I need to fill my lungs, so I’m going to stand here on the corner in this overly warm March sun with my shoulders back as I breathe deeply.

We must believe Sisyphus to be happy, because if he can be happy, then free-will exists. If Sisyphus can be happy, any one of us can be happy. Each of us, toiling in the Groundhog’s Days of our Lives, pushing our own boulders that seem to always keep crashing back down, can stand at the tops of our hills, catch our breaths with our shoulders back. And that moment, we choose to be happy.