Sisyphus

"We build on foundations we did not lay. 

We warm ourselves at fires we did not light. 

We sit in the shade of trees we did not plant. 

We drink from wells we did not dig. 

We profit from persons we did not know. 

We are ever bound in community."

Deuteronomy 6:10-12, adapted by Rev. Dr. Peter S. Raible

I was six months pregnant with my daughter on the night of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. I fell asleep in my then-four-year-old son's bed while tucking him in and woke up several hours later in the middle of the night to a notification on my phone and into a reality that few had anticipated. My immediate reaction was uncertainty and an overwhelming fear of the unknown future that we'd all just been thrust into. I'd intended for this to be my last pregnancy - would my reproductive choices still be honored in three months' time? What would become of my job, which supported the public health programs the president-elect had sworn to eliminate? What about the immigrant families who filled my neighborhood and my son's preschool class, and who added so much to my community? And what about my kids, and everybody's kids, who didn't ask for any of this and who would reap the consequences of this decision long after the ones responsible for it were gone?

Things have been hard since then. They've gotten a little easier with time, as we've managed to reverse course in a few important ways and the efforts of many hardworking people have mitigated or avoided some of the worst potential outcomes. I also recognize that my own relative privilege has insulated me where others have suffered. After my daughter was born in early 2017, I watched a lot of this happen, feeling helpless to intervene as the realities of parenting an infant and a kindergartner while maintaining full-time employment occupied virtually all of my time and energy. People around me were badly harmed by the whims of the fascist buffoons who'd found themselves in charge of our federal government, or got hypnotized by various forms of extremism, or wasted time on conspiracy theories and charlatans promising One Weird Trick To Restore Democracy!, or just doomscrolled their way ever deeper into a social media black hole (where I joined them far too often). All of this was pretty much what I expected when that notification first came through.

What I didn't expect was how, over the course of that first horrendous political year that also coincided with my daughter's first year of life, I would come to believe that despair was a luxury I couldn't afford. At age five, my son was just starting to be old enough to notice current events and to ask questions, and you have to be ready to answer. And I believe it to be parental malpractice at best to respond to an innocent inquiry by telling your kid that the world sucks, we're all doomed, and nothing is ever going to get any better - even if that was how I felt more often than not during that year. I am also a big believer in not lying to my kids if I can at all help it, which meant that I needed to find ways to access some glimmer of hope within myself, even when it was the last thing I wanted to do. The poem "Good Bones" by Maggie Smith (which you've probably seen reshared infinitely many times on social media since its publication in 2016) expresses this better than I ever could:

…Life is short and the world

is at least half terrible, and for every kind

stranger, there is one who would break you,

though I keep this from my children. I am trying

to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,

walking you through a real shithole, chirps on

about good bones: This place could be beautiful,

right? You could make this place beautiful.

Cartoon by José María Nieto: “I don’t see a reason to be optimistic. What will 2017 bring us?” “I think it will bring flowers.” “Really? Why?” “Because I’m planting flowers.”

I am not an optimistic person by nature, and I resented (and still resent) having to find ways to be hopeful in the middle of this ongoing dumpster fire like you would not believe. And I wonder sometimes if it was really the right choice to bring kids into it. Yet I also know that people for generations before me did the same thing, during war and famine and oppression and circumstances infinitely more horrible than anything I am likely to ever face. I'll grant that for some (or many) of those people, the lack of agency over their own reproduction didn't afford much of a choice. But there were those who did choose - and even more importantly, those who laid a foundation for the generations that would come after them, knowing they were unlikely to enjoy the fruits of their labors. I am the result of a long line of ancestors who survived unthinkably trying times and still believed something better was possible. It dishonors their sacrifices if I refuse to continue the work that they began - and if I don't try to leave things a little better than they were for the people who will come after me, even when that seems unthinkable.

All of these thoughts and feelings crystallized in early 2018 around being reminded by something in the news (I don't even remember what anymore) of Albert Camus' essay "The Myth of Sisyphus," which I had read a long time ago as part of a college course on existentialist philosophy. If you've never read the essay (though I recommend that you do), it uses the story of Sisyphus as a metaphor to explore the question of how to respond to an absurd and incomprehensible existence, one where we never seem to make any progress toward the better way of being we seek. When meaning is elusive, Camus argues, it falls to us to make our own meaning out of the endless slog we find ourselves in: "One must imagine Sisyphus happy." With that central image in place, the song all but wrote itself. (This is pretty standard for my songwriting process - I spend a long time mulling over and distilling song ideas internally, and when I finally write them down I don't often do much editing of what comes out.)

"I predict that the new song I'm writing will replace 'Distraction' as the most frequently misinterpreted piece in my repertoire," I posted on Facebook on January 17, 2018 while in the middle of working on "Sisyphus" on my lunch break at work. (People - including, memorably, a music critic - assume that "Distraction" is about an actual person I dated. Surprise, it's about a guy my Mage: The Ascension character dated.) This didn't turn out to be accurate. I often find that the more specific to my own experiences I perceive a song to be, the more universally relevant people seem to find it. "Sisyphus" was no exception. I am gratified that it speaks to so many of you. I hope the album's other songs on the same theme will speak to you too.