We Are No Sisyphus!

We Are No Sisyphus

According to Greek Mythology, Sisyphus was the son o Aeolus, the king of Thessaly, the founder and first king of Corinth. He was known not only for being a tyrant but also for his deceitfulness, dishonesty and deviousness.  Once, he escaped death himself, by deceiving Thanatos, the god of death, and incarcerating him in his own home as he came for him.

For all his crimes and treachery, Zeus condemned Sisyphus to spend all eternity rolling a huge bolder up a steep hillside. Every time he got close to the hilltop, he would be so exhausted that would let the bolder go. The bolder would then roll back downhill to where it originally was, forcing Sisyphus to come down and begin his tedious and painful labor all over again.

In 1941, the French philosopher Albert Camus wrote an essay using the myth of Sisyphus to illustrate the absurdity of human life. Camus drove the point that quite often men can be stuck in the most menial, tedious, laborious, repetitive and meaningless tasks without ever questioning the absurdity of such tasks and yet be content.

I go beyond that. It is quite often that we see people consuming their lives carrying the heaviest burdens in the most oblivious, irrational ways.  Burdens that some times don’t even belong to them or, perhaps, that they picked when they were little and many years later still feel that they have to carry them.  Wake up! Just drop that unreasonable, irrational burden of yours. Try looking the other way around and you may just realize that the burden was not even yours to begin with, or it was something unreasonably pushed on you when you were a kid and you still feel like you have to carry it, even when you are all grown up. Move on! Look up! There may be a much brighter, happier, colorful future waiting for your straight ahead but one that you will never get to see if you keep going back to that same unreasonable burden again and again. God gave us free will, a heart full of resources and a mind capable of complex decisions. Listen me up, you are not Sisyphus!

Link to the Wikipedia section on Sisyphus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus