Recently I had a significant period of time where I stopped playing guitar – a couple of week’s vacation and then a few weeks focused on a very joyful event: the birth of our grandson, Oliver. When I started to play again this week the callouses on my fingers were pretty much gone and I had to start the mildly painful process of getting them back again.
The Greek myth of Sisyphus depicts a man forced by the Gods to endlessly roll an immense boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down again. The myth is seen by some as a symbol of the absurdity of existence or the futility of human striving. But I see a lot of my life in the myth of Sisyphus and I don’t regard it as necessarily absurd or futile, though it is sometimes frustrating.
The truth is that I find myself repeating a lot of the efforts of my life. I go to the gym for a period of time and then take a break or get injured. When I return, I have to go through the process of building up my stamina and strength again. The same goes for running (back when I used to run) or cycling. My many years of soccer waxed and waned and I found my skill level had to be re-acquired through practice and play each time I took a significant break.
I am currently studying French and Spanish, and I am slowly building competence in listening, reading and speaking. But any time away from these studies causes the boulder to roll back a bit and I must re-commit myself to the task and build up my comprehension again.
The same goes for many other areas of study or knowledge. I find my grasp of history fades and I will periodically refresh it through reading books and doing Internet research. I have learned and re-learned mathematics and physics many, many times as the need has arisen (going back for a masters then a PhD; teaching IB math; tutoring in math and physics).
Or consider the routine tasks of life – cleaning the house, maintaining the landscaping, even conducting one’s daily hygiene. These are all Sisyphean tasks. The house is clean, then slowly gets dirty. The lawn is cut, the grass grows back. The beard is shaven, it returns.
The second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system left to spontaneous evolution cannot decrease with time. Entropy is a measure of disorder. It takes energy to make order out of disorder, knowledge out of ignorance and skill out of incompetence.
We supply that energy to all the different facets of our lives and we proudly observe the order that results, but inevitably the boulder rolls back a bit, or even all the way and we must exert ourselves anew. There may be a few places where we are able to hold the boulder at bay, or a few more challenging hills where our efforts continue to push the boulder ever higher, but at some point even these will lapse and we will have to pick ourselves up and make the effort to regain the ground we have lost.
There is an element of futility, and even absurdity, in all of this, and one is occasionally struck by the thought that life consists of simply going through the same motions again and again.
But I try to fight this inclination to demean our efforts. There is nobility in work and activity, even if it is partly Sisyphean. We commune with the rest of the world and with nature in our quest to make order from disorder. There is no shame in repetition or even drudgery if it is done in good faith and with purpose. Perhaps there is no higher calling. And, of course, there are always new boulders to push to keep things interesting!
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