Absurdity
from 
JoeUser Forums
JoeUser Forums
With palms together,
Good Morning Everyone,
Yesterday I did hill training in the morning. Hmmm. This means running up a perfectly good hill then walking back down only to run up again. It seems there was an old Greek myth about that sort of activity.
Sisyphus was a trickster and really full of himself. He was a con artist who did what he could to get what he wanted, often believing he could outfox the gods. In the end he was caught and punished. His destiny was to push a giant rock up a hill only to have it escape him just at the top.
We often think of this myth when doing something that seems repetitive and pointless. Yet, this myth reveals a point of view ingrained in the west, that the conclusion of an activity is its reward, rather than the activity itself.
This bias is so pervasive that we often don't see its destructiveness. How often do we go to work only to think about what fun we will have when we get off at quiting time? When we think this way, we are not in the moment at all and our work suffers. But more to the point, we suffer. By not being present with our work, we don't appreciate it. We fail to see its value. This is our hell.
Sisyphus suffered only because he wanted to stop his work. He suffered because he saw pushing the rock up the hill as pointless only because it was repelled back down again. But the pushing of the rock, itself, was just pushing the rock. Not pointless.
Pointlessness, absurdity, these are mental constructs devised by minds too full of themselves to enjoy their present state. When we do to do and not to get done, then there is no such thing as pointless and it is the notion that things must have a point to be worth doing that is, in fact, absurd.
Be well.
Good Morning Everyone,
Yesterday I did hill training in the morning. Hmmm. This means running up a perfectly good hill then walking back down only to run up again. It seems there was an old Greek myth about that sort of activity.
Sisyphus was a trickster and really full of himself. He was a con artist who did what he could to get what he wanted, often believing he could outfox the gods. In the end he was caught and punished. His destiny was to push a giant rock up a hill only to have it escape him just at the top.
We often think of this myth when doing something that seems repetitive and pointless. Yet, this myth reveals a point of view ingrained in the west, that the conclusion of an activity is its reward, rather than the activity itself.
This bias is so pervasive that we often don't see its destructiveness. How often do we go to work only to think about what fun we will have when we get off at quiting time? When we think this way, we are not in the moment at all and our work suffers. But more to the point, we suffer. By not being present with our work, we don't appreciate it. We fail to see its value. This is our hell.
Sisyphus suffered only because he wanted to stop his work. He suffered because he saw pushing the rock up the hill as pointless only because it was repelled back down again. But the pushing of the rock, itself, was just pushing the rock. Not pointless.
Pointlessness, absurdity, these are mental constructs devised by minds too full of themselves to enjoy their present state. When we do to do and not to get done, then there is no such thing as pointless and it is the notion that things must have a point to be worth doing that is, in fact, absurd.
Be well.