Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.
Joseph Campbell
What do you do when you don’t like the life you have? What action would you take if you felt your lot in life sucked like a vacuum cleaner? Obviously if you don’t like where you are, or what you are pressed to do, you can change. You can quit a job and get another. You can break-up, get a divorce, go AWOL, or take your ball and go home. Can’t you?
If I’ve heard this once I’ve heard it 27 times, maybe a thousand times:
IF LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS MAKE LEMON AIDE!
This is good advice. You should take what you have and figure out how to make it better, but this advice is too simplistic. If life gives you lemons, but life also makes every form of sweetener unavailable to you, then lemon aide is not an option. Maybe you can do something else with lemons, other than aide them, but figuring out that other less obvious option can be so difficult that the lemon owners may never come up with answers.
I think, for a lot of us, we are condemned to a life similar to the one with which Sisyphus was left. Maybe you don’t know the story of Sisyphus.
The Sisyphus Story
Sisyphus was the son of a king and went into the family business. Sisyphus
founded a city (known in the Bible as Corinth) and Sisyphus crowned himself the
first city KING. But like all Kings, Sisyphus was worried about people pulling
some sort of coup d'etat. To ensure his grip on power was permanent, Sisyphus
broke the hospitality laws of his day and would kill stranger travelers that
came into his city. Sisyphus also blabbed one of the secrets of Zeus (the head
god). When you piss off the head guy you have gone too far, and Sisyphus done
just that.
Zeus ordered the Death god (Thanatos) to put handcuffs on the
dude and haul Sisyphus to the Underworld (the place where all the dead go).
Sisyphus was a devious dude. When Thanatos showed up, Sisyphus said how much he
admired those cuffs, and how curious he was about how they work, and Thanatos
was feeling all proud and all because he’d designed these handcuffs himself. So
when Sisyphus asked Tanatos to put the cuffs on so he could see exactly how they
worked, Thanatos did, and suddenly Sisyphus had Death in shackles and put him in prison and OUT of commission.
The big problem with putting Death in chains is that no one died. A guy could have all his arms and legs cut off, and his guts ripped out, and he would not die. The Generals were all frustrated because no matter how well the battle went the enemy just would not die. So one of the Generals went and rescued Death allowing Thanatos to go on doing his business, and Sisyphus was delivered to the Underworld. Before Sisyphus was taken, however, he asked his wife to do something he knew she would never do. He asked her to through his naked body into the town square.
When Sisyphus’s last request was not carried out, he started complaining to
Persephone, the Goddess of Innocence and Queen of the Underworld, and eventually he got Persephone on his side. Persephone agreed to allow Sisyphus to leave the Underworld so he could go back to the land of the living and scold his wife for not following his last wish.
Obviously, this was just another trick. Once back in the land of the living Sisyphus refused to return to the Underworld. Now Zeus was really steamed and got a real hit man to capture Sisyphus and this time his punishment was not just being condemned to the Underworld, this time a really unique punishment was devised.
Sisyphus was condemned to push a boulder up a steep incline, so steep that no one could succeed in pushing that boulder over the top. So the boulder would, at some point, roll back down the incline. Sisyphus would then have to go back and try again. Over and over Sisyphus would try to push that boulder over the top and all the time he knew he could never succeed. Sisyphus was condemned to perform a task that he could never hope to complete, and he could never stop trying.
In a way, Sisyphus had a lemon life, but there was no way he could ever turn it into lemon aide. Now I identify with Sisyphus, and I imagine there are a few million other folk that feel the same way I do about the Sisyphus trap.
There is one other choice available to a guy who has lots of lemons and no sweetener. If you can’t make something sweet out of your stash of lemons, you can learn to like lemons just the way they are. If you feel stuck in your sour life, and there is no way you can find to sweeten up that life, and no other way out that you can think of, you can chose to accept the life you have, you can just resign yourself to the life you’ve got.
There is an advantage to giving up your search for fairness, and striving for a more enjoyable life. If you stop struggling for something forever out of reach, at least now you have a life in which you are struggling. Before you may have been trying this and trying that, and complaining, and hating your circumstances, but once you give up, once you resign yourself to the life you have you suddenly do have a life that is slightly less miserable: you can stop looking, stop struggling, and just live. Your circumstances have not changed, but that constantly reaching for something forever out of reach, is no longer a part of that stuck life.
I can hear my therapist, my wife, and my two friends object.
“But if you give up, if you are resigned to your unhappy life, you are also choosing to live in a hopeless life. You are living WITHOUT HOPE!”
I’m not opposed to hope. I am opposed to false hope. I think real hope is a motivator but I also think that false home is the trigger that fires off bullets. These kinds of bullets:
• depression
• anger
• anxiety
• obsessive compulsive disorder
• bipolar disorder
I know that you can search your back copies of Reader’s Digest, and Guide Post Magazine and you will find stories about people who thought their miserable life was hopeless, and then, God, or some motivated doctor, or Karma, or fate, or dumb luck shows up with a solution to their problem they had no idea existed.
You can use such stories to be a cheering section in your brain that goes, “Keep trying! Never give up!” “There’s always hope!”
I am not saying that there are hopeful situations, and hopeless situations and that I know which is which. When Christopher Reeves (Superman) broke his neck and became a quadriplegic he still had hope that medical research scientists would come up with a way to grow spinal cords. If repairing the spine was impossible then maybe there would be some advanced mechanical prosthesis developed that would allow Superman to walk again. Maybe Mr. Reeves and people in similar circumstances need to believe there is hope. Without hope they would lose their will to live. AND there are times when people give up, surrender their will to live, and stop living.
Maybe there is always hope, but I still believe there is realistic hope and pipe-dream hope. No one can know for sure which is which, but sometimes you can be pretty dawl-gone confident in one or the other.
Oh, yeah, there are times when there is hope, there is a way out of your situation, but it is not a way you are willing to follow. You could live if doctors cut out your child’s liver and transplanted it to you, but doing so would cause the child to die. There is hope. There is a solution. But it is not a solution you are willing to take.
You could have financial problems and there is no way you will ever earn enough money fast enough to pay off the debt, but you could rob a bank, or kill your spouse for the insurance money, but those choices are choices most of us are just not willing to take.
Sisyphus is an example of a guy who got himself into one jam after another, and was diligent, committed and cleaver about finding solutions to situations that appeared to be hopeless. Sisyphus was successful several times, but eventually he got that boulder pushing sentence, and finally he was in a place he couldn’t get out of, forced to do a job that made no sense. That seems like my life. I am not wild about the life I have now. For more than 40 years I tried to get out of bad situations and into good situations. It was more like one of those “out of the frying pan, into the fire” deals. Like Sisyphus I tried to escape the aspects of my life that make me miserable, and now, just like Sisyphus, I find I am condemned to the life I have. There hundreds of things about my life I wish were better, but the solution requires me to do something I am not willing to do, or the solution just isn’t there (or probably isn’t there.)
I am not sure how Sisyphus did it. Thank about it. Sisyphus is still, this very day, pushing that dang boulder up that same incline. I like to think that Sisyphus did what I am doing. I am resigning myself to the life I have, and resignation is actually a peephole through the confining walls of my life. But, by resigning myself to the life I have now, does actually change my life, in a positive way. This may not be true for everyone, but it is true for me, Sisyphus, maybe a whole bunch of others. A less than ideal life dominated by hope-inspired struggles is worse than a less than ideal life free of hope-inspired struggles.
Sisyphus was the son of a king and went into the family business. Sisyphus
founded a city (known in the Bible as Corinth) and Sisyphus crowned himself the
first city KING. But like all Kings, Sisyphus was worried about people pulling
some sort of coup d'etat. To ensure his grip on power was permanent, Sisyphus
broke the hospitality laws of his day and would kill stranger travelers that
came into his city. Sisyphus also blabbed one of the secrets of Zeus (the head
god). When you piss off the head guy you have gone too far, and Sisyphus done
just that.
Zeus ordered the Death god (Thanatos) to put handcuffs on the
dude and haul Sisyphus to the Underworld (the place where all the dead go).
Sisyphus was a devious dude. When Thanatos showed up, Sisyphus said how much he
admired those cuffs, and how curious he was about how they work, and Thanatos
was feeling all proud and all because he’d designed these handcuffs himself. So
when Sisyphus asked Tanatos to put the cuffs on so he could see exactly how they
worked, Thanatos did, and suddenly Sisyphus had Death in shackles and put him in prison and OUT of commission.
The big problem with putting Death in chains is that no one died. A guy could have all his arms and legs cut off, and his guts ripped out, and he would not die. The Generals were all frustrated because no matter how well the battle went the enemy just would not die. So one of the Generals went and rescued Death allowing Thanatos to go on doing his business, and Sisyphus was delivered to the Underworld. Before Sisyphus was taken, however, he asked his wife to do something he knew she would never do. He asked her to through his naked body into the town square.
When Sisyphus’s last request was not carried out, he started complaining to
Persephone, the Goddess of Innocence and Queen of the Underworld, and eventually he got Persephone on his side. Persephone agreed to allow Sisyphus to leave the Underworld so he could go back to the land of the living and scold his wife for not following his last wish.
Obviously, this was just another trick. Once back in the land of the living Sisyphus refused to return to the Underworld. Now Zeus was really steamed and got a real hit man to capture Sisyphus and this time his punishment was not just being condemned to the Underworld, this time a really unique punishment was devised.
Sisyphus was condemned to push a boulder up a steep incline, so steep that no one could succeed in pushing that boulder over the top. So the boulder would, at some point, roll back down the incline. Sisyphus would then have to go back and try again. Over and over Sisyphus would try to push that boulder over the top and all the time he knew he could never succeed. Sisyphus was condemned to perform a task that he could never hope to complete, and he could never stop trying.
In a way, Sisyphus had a lemon life, but there was no way he could ever turn it into lemon aide. Now I identify with Sisyphus, and I imagine there are a few million other folk that feel the same way I do about the Sisyphus trap.
There is one other choice available to a guy who has lots of lemons and no sweetener. If you can’t make something sweet out of your stash of lemons, you can learn to like lemons just the way they are. If you feel stuck in your sour life, and there is no way you can find to sweeten up that life, and no other way out that you can think of, you can chose to accept the life you have, you can just resign yourself to the life you’ve got.
There is an advantage to giving up your search for fairness, and striving for a more enjoyable life. If you stop struggling for something forever out of reach, at least now you have a life in which you are struggling. Before you may have been trying this and trying that, and complaining, and hating your circumstances, but once you give up, once you resign yourself to the life you have you suddenly do have a life that is slightly less miserable: you can stop looking, stop struggling, and just live. Your circumstances have not changed, but that constantly reaching for something forever out of reach, is no longer a part of that stuck life.
I can hear my therapist, my wife, and my two friends object.
“But if you give up, if you are resigned to your unhappy life, you are also choosing to live in a hopeless life. You are living WITHOUT HOPE!”
I’m not opposed to hope. I am opposed to false hope. I think real hope is a motivator but I also think that false home is the trigger that fires off bullets. These kinds of bullets:
• depression
• anger
• anxiety
• obsessive compulsive disorder
• bipolar disorder
I know that you can search your back copies of Reader’s Digest, and Guide Post Magazine and you will find stories about people who thought their miserable life was hopeless, and then, God, or some motivated doctor, or Karma, or fate, or dumb luck shows up with a solution to their problem they had no idea existed.
You can use such stories to be a cheering section in your brain that goes, “Keep trying! Never give up!” “There’s always hope!”
I am not saying that there are hopeful situations, and hopeless situations and that I know which is which. When Christopher Reeves (Superman) broke his neck and became a quadriplegic he still had hope that medical research scientists would come up with a way to grow spinal cords. If repairing the spine was impossible then maybe there would be some advanced mechanical prosthesis developed that would allow Superman to walk again. Maybe Mr. Reeves and people in similar circumstances need to believe there is hope. Without hope they would lose their will to live. AND there are times when people give up, surrender their will to live, and stop living.
Maybe there is always hope, but I still believe there is realistic hope and pipe-dream hope. No one can know for sure which is which, but sometimes you can be pretty dawl-gone confident in one or the other.
Oh, yeah, there are times when there is hope, there is a way out of your situation, but it is not a way you are willing to follow. You could live if doctors cut out your child’s liver and transplanted it to you, but doing so would cause the child to die. There is hope. There is a solution. But it is not a solution you are willing to take.
You could have financial problems and there is no way you will ever earn enough money fast enough to pay off the debt, but you could rob a bank, or kill your spouse for the insurance money, but those choices are choices most of us are just not willing to take.
Sisyphus is an example of a guy who got himself into one jam after another, and was diligent, committed and cleaver about finding solutions to situations that appeared to be hopeless. Sisyphus was successful several times, but eventually he got that boulder pushing sentence, and finally he was in a place he couldn’t get out of, forced to do a job that made no sense. That seems like my life. I am not wild about the life I have now. For more than 40 years I tried to get out of bad situations and into good situations. It was more like one of those “out of the frying pan, into the fire” deals. Like Sisyphus I tried to escape the aspects of my life that make me miserable, and now, just like Sisyphus, I find I am condemned to the life I have. There hundreds of things about my life I wish were better, but the solution requires me to do something I am not willing to do, or the solution just isn’t there (or probably isn’t there.)
I am not sure how Sisyphus did it. Thank about it. Sisyphus is still, this very day, pushing that dang boulder up that same incline. I like to think that Sisyphus did what I am doing. I am resigning myself to the life I have, and resignation is actually a peephole through the confining walls of my life. But, by resigning myself to the life I have now, does actually change my life, in a positive way. This may not be true for everyone, but it is true for me, Sisyphus, maybe a whole bunch of others. A less than ideal life dominated by hope-inspired struggles is worse than a less than ideal life free of hope-inspired struggles.
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