Keep pushing the rock
Roderick Benns is the publisher of The Advocate. An award-winning author and journalist who grew up in Lindsay, he has written several books including Basic Income: How a Canadian Movement Could Change the World.
When you’ve lived long enough to know that life is a series of cycles – good and bad, fast and slow, intense and languid – it’s a little easier to rebound from the hard days. But it always tests and challenges.
I had such a taxing year in 1998 when my father, 58, was dying in Toronto General Hospital. Across the road, just 48 hours later, my four-month-old son was getting a new lease on life at Sick Kids, to fix a major heart condition. There was quiet faith in science for the young; a questioning of faith for the not-so-old. Good and bad, fast and slow. It will always be.
Twenty-eight years later (and just a few weeks ago, for me), my 20-year-old said goodbye to go wilderness camping, live off the land, and explore this incredible country. Goodbyes are the worst, as any parent knows. And as any parent also recognizes, letting it happen with grace is the most profound gift you can give.
Just 24 hours after my youngest son left home, knapsack on his back, my eldest son was struck by a series of seizures. In the end, he had to have brain surgery to save his life.
When it was appropriate, I joked with him that he was trying to complete the Wizard of Oz trifecta; first a Tin Man heart focus, then a Scarecrow brain. (I happen to think he already has the leonine courage, having gone through too many major traumas in his young life.)
So there were points this past month when I felt I was at an emotional nadir. But I have a supportive partner. I had a pint with compassionate friends, in which to confide. And it’s wrenching to realize that not everyone does.
Most people (or is it mostly men?) aim for some level of stoicism when confronted with emotional turmoil. But stoicism has its limits. Albert Camus, who wrote The Myth of Sisyphus, would say there’s no grand lesson in any of this — no cosmic ledger balancing joy and suffering. And yet isn’t life exactly that?
The trips across Canada with my kids. The quiet thrill of success at work. A nice homemade dinner or rewatching my favourite movie, The Fisher King, for the 10th time. Aren’t these shards of light something to weigh against the darkness of my June?
Life simply unfolds, Camus would say, with tenderness or cruelty, in a way that can feel intensely personal. But the bottom line is we know, deep down, that the rock will roll down the hill again. But we choose to keep loving, keep showing up to push it, keep saying yes to the world even when it feels indifferent.
Camus imagined Sisyphus happy not because the task changed, but because he did — because he claimed the struggle as his own. Maybe that’s the quiet truth in all these cycles. We don’t control the rise and fall of the great stones in our lives, but we do control the meaning we make in the middle. And sometimes, that’s enough to keep going.
