Have you ever heard of Sisyphus? Or the Myth of Sisyphus? No? You probably have but didn’t realize it. It’s the story of that ancient Greek who was punished by the gods to push a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down to the bottom before he reached the top…for all of eternity. Why do I bring that up? A French writer/philosopher (Camus) in 1942 published a philosophical essay called The Myth of Sisyphus. He suggested that there is only one question worthy of answering: Does the realization of the meaninglessness and absurdity of life necessarily require suicide?

The meaninglessness and absurdity of life? Interesting. I don’t know how Camus came to view life as meaningless and absurd but let me tell you how I did. Humans are small. Very small. Nope. Smaller than that. I weigh a svelte 185 pounds (a dead sexy 185 lbs no less). A bus might weigh around 20,000 pounds. The M1A1 Main Battle Tank weighs roughly 65 tons. The Earth weighs about 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000 tons. There is a short video here that shows the relative size of the Earth to the planets and several different known stars. Amazing video huh? Now think on this. There are roughly 300 Billion (with a “B”) stars in our galaxy. There are roughly 80 Billion (with a “B”) galaxies in the observable Universe. Yeah. That bears a pause don’t you think? Go back and read it again. Go ahead. I’ll wait. This is a beginning to understanding size. We are small.

I am in Djibouti, Africa. That is basically 7,500 miles from my home in North Carolina. Miami is 240,000 miles from the Moon. An Astronomical Unit (AU) is defined as the distance from the Earth to the Sun – which is roughly 93,000,000 miles. That is just a bit farther than me to Syracuse. Now the object formerly known as planet Pluto is pretty far away from us. It is almost 40 AUs away. The Voyager I space probe was launched in 1977 and is traveling at a speed of 38,400 miles per hour. As of 21 December, 2009 it was 112 AUs from the Sun. That’s the end of our Solar System right? Nope. But that’s what we were taught in school right? 9 planets. That’s it. Well now we’re down to 8 planets and come to find out there is a bit more to our Solar System. Ever heard of the Oort cloud? Doesn’t matter. It is roughly 50,000 AUs from Philadelphia. Acknowledging that the Oort Cloud is part of our Solar System and then recognizing that our star is one of…well…many (re-read above if you forgot) is a beginning to understanding distance. We are small.

Let’s talk about time for a moment. As I write this, I am 36 years old. What? I know. Thanks for noticing. No I don’t do anything special. You look good too. No, I’m not just saying that. Really. Anyways, the average human lifespan is roughly 70 years. During my lifetime, I think it is reasonable to expect that I will affect (have a truly meaningful impact) on some 500 people’s lives. Maybe that’s an overstatement. Who knows, maybe it will be more than that. But it seems reasonable. What about Brad Pitt? He certainly is known to more people. But meaningful impact? How about the President of the United States? How about the first one? George Washington. He has certainly had a meaningful impact on many more lives. How many people will George Washington have affected in say…500 years? He’s certainly done pretty well after 200 years. 1,000 years? 10,000 years? Humans have been in existence for roughly 200,000 years. How many people will he have affected when the Sun starts to die in roughly 5,000,000,000 years? We are small.

It is with this understanding and knowledge that life (my life more specifically) means nothing. Who I am and what I do is not significant on any scale other than the selfish scale of my own perspective. Everything and anything I do over the course of my entire existence has absolutely no effect on the Moon. Allow me to personify the Moon for a moment. The Moon couldn’t possibly care less about me. I don’t matter.

Some would say that I matter to God. Ok. Let’s talk about God for a second. I was raised Christian and as with most Americans I have a Judeo-Christian experience with religion. I was taught that in Heaven we will praise and exalt Him forever and ever. Forever and ever? Like forever-ever? Hmmm. Let’s give this idea a color: white. On the flip side, Hell is fire and torment forever and ever. Again with the forever. Let’s call this red. If there is no afterlife, and there is simply nothingness after death…that’s black. If there is no change, everything is all white, all red, or all black all the time, then there is no context through which one can differentiate or interpret joy or pain (sunshine or rain). There is only the constant. A constant anything becomes normal…becomes static…becomes numbness. Without a measure of change it is monotonous mediocrity. So when I die, if the television simply is turned off (there is no afterlife) or if it just stays on the noise between channels (there is an afterlife) what is the recognizable difference? I say there is none. So in the end, it doesn’t matter if I am of import to God because I will never be able to tell the difference. At this point it doesn’t matter what the color is. If it is unchanging red, unchanging white, or unchanging black…it is all grey.

What’s that? If life is meaningless, doesn’t that require suicide? Aha. I’m glad you asked that. Here comes the paradox. You see it is precisely because I don’t matter that everything matters to me. Let me put it another way. If I recognize that I have no significance, then I must also recognize that every moment I have on this Earth (as opposed to that other one over there which is like that other Denny’s…you know…the bad one) IS my entire universe. From my own experiential perspective, “This is [my] life…and it’s ending one minute at a time”. No one specific moment is better (or worse) than any other. Whether it is steeped in idle time or spent at the peak of rapturous joy the moment is the same. They are all a part of what I experience…who I am.

In fact, I value joy and pain (sunshine and rain) equally. It is the recognition of the ups and downs that make you alive. Make you really feel the music in it. Think of it as a sine wave (or a cosine wave if you want to be contrarian). Up and down. Some way ups. And some way downs. It is the unmoving middle that is death….hell. If I can’t distinguish one droning day from the next I am not living. I am flat lined. I die. So pain and joy are valuable to me. I do not want perpetual pain or joy…that is death. I want them both…that is living.

Life’s experiences are a memory of a moment that will not come again. Every moment is critical, crucial, unique…gone. What may seem like an irrelevant nothing to others is everything to me. If moments are spent denying the inevitability of death those moments are delusional. Acknowledging death means that I recognize that my moments are truly limited. This leads me to appreciation of each and every moment. Camus determined that the struggle of life is enough to fill a man’s soul (sorry ladies). So, I imagine Sisyphus pushing his rock. His calloused hands and feet throbbing in pain. His back and arms aching in protest. The warmth of the Sun on his face. The cool touch of the breeze on a Spring morning. Camus appropriately ended with “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

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