We must imagine Ourselves happy
This post is the seventh in a series hosted by UC Berkeley’s TAUG and the Claremont Colleges’ hearhere. In this weekly series, staff writers from both journals will be sharing their perspectives on the COVID-19 global pandemic. Click here for more information on TAUG and here for more information on hearhere.
How long, how long, in infinite Pursuit
Of This and That endeavor and dispute?
Better be merry with fruitful Grape
Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit.
- Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat XXXIX
Two months ago, my world started falling apart after it was hit with a wrecking ball in the form of an email.
“Please leave. Don’t come back. See you on Zoom.”
Getting kicked off campus was a wake up call to how serious the coronavirus pandemic had become, and in the two months that have followed that fateful email, I watched the outside world fall apart. The thousands of people who fall ill and die daily, the millions who have lost their livelihoods and the thousands more essential workers whose health is compromised are a testament to stark economic inequalities and the drastic under-preparation of most countries’ healthcare systems.
In the past two months, I watched my life mirror the outside world and fall apart as well. My carefully ordered life at college unraveled with an alarming swiftness, my seemingly important hustle and bustle on campus morphing into a grey monotony during the lockdown. As the march of days and weeks became indistinguishable from one another, I found myself trifling with various hobbies and watching a string of TV shows in an attempt to fill up the hours. I began reading books and didn’t finish them, started projects half-heartedly and abandoned them a few days later. Simultaneously, the thinly veiled hollowness of my activities sowed doubts as to whether my on-campus obligations had also been mere activities to fill up time, with no inherent purpose of their own.
As I attempt to make sense of how the pandemic has disrupted ‘normal’ life both on the individual and collective level, the mythical Greek hero Sisyphus comes to mind. How it must feel to have the rock he was pushing roll back down just as he reached the summit is how I imagine it must be to have our lives scrambled by the pandemic. The individual and collective rocks we had been pushing have started slipping out of our grips and rolling downhill, propelled by rapid changes everyday. For some of us, the rock that we had been pushing uphill was a potential career, a degree, or goals to work towards, now suspended in uncertainty. For me, the rock was a knowable, plan-able future as I prepared to go into my senior year of college.
However, considering that I currently have safe shelter and steady access to food and other essentials, the disruption to my life has not been as drastic as for others. All around the globe, students are facing housing insecurity, small business owners have lost their livelihoods, and people have lost loved ones. Many more continue to risk their lives to treat patients and keep our tables supplied with food, even as the healthcare and economic systems they work within are under strain or crumbling.
Just like Sisyphus’ punishment to endlessly roll a rock up a hill only to have it fall back down, the social systems and individual lives we carefully build seem doomed to eventually fall apart, leaving us to start over. This time it is a pandemic, but regardless of the cause, human history confirms that lives often get interrupted or derailed, and whole civilizations disintegrate, usually in ways that are out of our control. To see this, we don’t even have to look very far. The 20th century, most of it within the lifetimes of people alive today, was fraught with wars, natural disasters, whole nations dissolving, atrocious genocides, and devastating pandemics.
This seeming guarantee that our established ways of life will be knocked asunder reminds me of the conclusions that the author of the book of Ecclesiastes reaches. After surveying human activity under the sun, the Qoheleth (translated Teacher) realises that it is all futile, like chasing the wind. Under the Qoheleth’s critical eye, the pursuit of pleasure, of possessions, of wisdom, and any other activities that we assign special significance to, turn out to be part of an endless cycle of human striving. The generations that have lived before us have had their own rocks to roll uphill, whether it was collective pursuits to advance societies, or individuals’ pursuits to live a fulfilling life. Those rocks have eventually been rolled back down by some global or individual catastrophe. The generations that will come after us will also have their own rocks to roll uphill, whether it is some social ideal to strive for — be it justice or peace, or individual fulfillment and satisfaction. Those generations too will face some calamities, possibly ones even worse than COVID-19, and their rocks will rush downhill.
Fully accepting the conclusion that all of human activity is a futile effort to roll rocks up hills distresses me because it removes the gravitas and sense of purpose that I would like to assign to my activities. This is especially true during the lockdown, when the hours and days threaten to blend together. And certainly, other people have found more optimistic ways to interpret these abrupt changes to their life, using their newly free time for much-needed reflection on what truly matters to them and realigning their priorities accordingly. Although I cannot deny that these solutions have given people peace of mind and a restored sense of purpose, they seem shaky to me for the same reason that our initial ways of life were vulnerable to being knocked downhill. Who is to say that these new activities we take up to define ourselves by will not be blown away? How do we structure our lives so that the next set of activities we commit ourselves to, whether as individuals or communities, won’t also start rolling back on us, crushing us in the process?
I don’t know that there is an end to this cycle of building and having what we build knocked down, of crafting lives for ourselves only to watch them tumble down, knocked over by an unexpected catastrophe. As I have been straining to figure out how to appropriately respond to the profound sense of untethering this has caused in me, I find myself drawn to Camus’ concluding words in the Myth of Sisyphus:
“The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill [one]’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Perhaps, we must imagine ourselves happy as well. At first glance, these words smack of the absurd. How could we imagine someone happy when they were condemned to an eternal, purposeless fate? The fact that Sisyphus’ rock is doomed to always roll back down hill is only cause for despair if we define his purpose to be reaching the summit and staying there. As a result, we can never imagine him happy since he is guaranteed to fail over and over. The same goes for us; if we define our purpose by our accomplishments and the permanence of our actions, it becomes difficult to imagine ourselves happy. However, there is another way to live: we can do what Camus suggests and focus on the step by step, allowing the struggle, the everyday business of pushing our rocks, to fill our hearts.
The Qoheleth echoes this same view when he “[commends] the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun.” This encouragement to shift our attention to the everyday, ordinary, aspects of being alive is woven throughout the Qoheleth’s reflections about the vapor-like, ungraspable nature of human existence. And over and over, we are reminded that even when we are chasing the wind and not catching it, even when we’re rolling a rock up a hill knowing full well that it will come back down, our hearts can be full. We are allowed to imagine ourselves happy, without any qualifiers.
I am still learning what it means to do that. During lockdown, I am starting with resisting the temptation to assign permanent and solid purposes to every single thing I do. Instead, I am learning to find contentment in simple acts of eating and drinking, in calling friends and family, and doing schoolwork for its own sake. As hard as it is, I am imagining myself happy by resting the immediate and the present, and holding my grand purposes for life loosely. The recognition that our activities and ways of life can be knocked out of our hands anytime and rush downhill doesn’t have to stand in the way of finding contentment. Instead, we can walk back down hill and shoulder the rock, ready to begin again, without shackling ourselves to the end result, the attainment of the summit. Once this pandemic has passed and “normal life” has been restored, push with all your might whatever rock you will have picked up, and let the struggle be enough to fill your heart.
Thummim Mekuria is a junior at Pomona College majoring in Philosophy and Astrophysics, with a minor in Studio Art.
for more information about hearhere:
Facebook: fb.me/hearherejournal
Instagram: instagram.com/hearhere.journal
Email: hearherejournal@gmail.com