You know, Sisyphus never got his rock over the hill. But would his torment have been different, in some respects, if his work consisted in pushing the same rock over an endless succession of hills for eternity?
Is this not life, in some respects?
I was thinking about lists. I come and go as far as my ability to make lists and work my way down them. Some days I am reasonably productive, many days less so. I am almost never optimized by anything but clear and present necessity.
Here is the thing, though, the FACT of the list never really varies, does it? That is your stone. It will be there waiting for you every morning.
The path to sanity is remaking and renegotiating your relationship with that stone, to accepting it, and feeling gratitude that there IS variation, that it is not Groundhog Day, and that the quality and spirit of your work is amenable to change and improvement.
What SHOULD our natural, default state be? Motionlessness, or work? The Jews figured 6 days on, 1 day off was a good ratio. That makes work our default state, and rest the means of not breaking down from work.
We have so many associations with “work”, many of them bad. Work is effort, is will power, is doing things you don’t want to do. What is the opposite? Play. Work hard play hard, right?
And as they say, if you find something you love to do, then you never work a day in your life.
The task then, is approaching work with a spirit of play, and play means never quite exactly repeating yourself, and allowing spontaneity. You don’t steel yourself to work; you allow yourself to work.
There is something useful in these ruminations, I think.