Sisyphus' Dilemma

So I stumbled across this on FaceBook, the site of all wasted time and procrastination. Maybe it’s not such a waste of time after all. I found this anecdotal story to be very profound and moving. I rarely share things like this to a large selection of people but I am sharing it with you because I feel you can relate to it and will appreciate the depth of it. The link is here, with the text to follow in the body below:

What’s the Best Lesson You Ever Learned from a Teacher?

I started studying the violin in my 30s, working with a warm, intense teacher named Malone. After 5 years he put Bach’s D minor partita in front of me. “We’ll start with the Allemande,” he said. He put the music on the stand and talked me through the first movement, pencilling in bowings and fingerings, occasionally demonstrating how to get through some rhythmic puzzle, and sent me home. I practiced hard all week and came in ready to play about half the first page.

He stopped me on the second note. “Please put down the violin,” he said. I did.

“You’re skipping through that first D. I know it’s just a fucking little sixteenth note, but you have to play the whole thing. I don’t even mean the time. You’re actually giving it enough time. But you’re playing over it instead of through it. You have to play right through the center of it. It’s a leading note, but it’s not just a step into the room. It is the room, and you have to put us there. Play it. Play through every single note in the piece.”

I started to reach for the violin. He held up a hand.

“Wait,” he said. “This is Bach. And Bach, more than any other music, and these pieces, more than any other Bach, is music complete. This doesn’t just mean it’s beautiful. This means you can play this music all your life, even just this Allemande, and no matter what you do, it will expose you. It will expose everything you are and everything you’re not. It will expose everything you can do and everything you can’t. It will expose everything you’ve mastered and everything you’re scared of. And I don’t mean just about the violin. I mean about everything. It’ll show all that today and it’ll show all that when you play it again in 10 years. And people who know music, who’ve seen you play it both times, they will see you play it and know who you were and who you’ve become.

“There is nothing you can do about this. Or actually there is only one thing you can do about it. And that’s to play the fucking music. To not play scared, even if you’re terrified. To not rush. To not short anything. Inhabit this thing. Play it full.”

He took a deep breath, let it out slow, and gave me the tiniest hint of a smile. “Okay,” he said, and nodded at my violin. “Play.”

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus ( /!s”s#f#s/; Greek: !”#$%&’, Sísyphos) was a king punished by being compelled to roll an immense boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity.

The word “sisyphean” means “endless and unavailing, as labor or a task”.

I feel certain Sisyphus would leave his boulder on the mountain were he not forced to follow his path of futility. But let’s say he DID indeed have the choice. Would he? Like many, I suspect he would find walking away from the familiar to explore the unknown to be unnerving at best and debilitating at worst. Granted, the gods had punished Sisyphus for his hubris. Who is punishing us? Why do we insist upon following blindly in the pre-proscribed steps of our parents, our clergy, our politicians, our peers? Why do we accept at face value that which we know to be in direct conflict with what is just, fair, equitable and right? Since when did critical thinking become a liability?

My first guess is fear. Fear of change. Fear of the unknown. Fear of being held accountable for one’s purpose and answerable to the status quo for why one chooses the less trodden path of individual responsibility and growth. If we live as lemmings, we will die as lemmings.

My other guess is distraction. It is very difficult to focus on changing your lot in life when you are distracted by merely surviving. We as a people are stuck in the deep divide of those who have more than enough and those who struggle to merely survive. The powerful and the rich (one and the same, these days) know that a people so engaged in survival cannot rise up against those guarding the gates of prosperity.

Like bouncers at an exclusive nightclub, they pick and choose those to be allowed entry into their hallowed halls of privilege. Turning away those of the wrong sort, those not pure enough of ideology, clear enough of pedigree. As long as we continue our Sisyphean existence, blindly rolling the boulders of another’s prosperity, we deserve what we reap. If we choose to not think for ourselves and allow others to think for us. If we choose to ignore the blatant spin of our media and to not bother verifying the lies our politicians tell us. Then we truly deserve no better than to be crushed by the weight of our culpability rolling down the mountain on us.

We should look in our mirror and ask ourselves if we wish to continue to struggle up that mountain pushing someone else’s boulder. At the very least we should ask why we choose to do so, and choose a rock to our liking.

Cogito ergo sum.

Lesson’s

SISYPHUS’ MIRROR

Who I am