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In an early collection of essays, Albert Camus recognizes that when a person confronts the absurd
circumstances of life they can react in one of two ways:
Either they fall into despair, which most of us know as existential angst, or they revolt.
The Greek gods condemned Sisyphus to an eternity of hard labor rolling a boulder up a hill, and he too was
given this choice.
Imagine living for all of eternity
Bearing a burden so magnanimous you reach the top of the hill only to discover the boulder rolls back down again.
According to Camus, this is where it gets interesting.
He finds something peculiar in the moment Sisyphus turns around.
"It is during that return that pause that says if it interests me, I face that toils
So close to stones is already stone itself.
I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end.
In that hour like a reathing space which returns as surely as his suffering -
That is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the layers of the Gods,
He is superior to his fate.
He is stronger than his rock.
According to Camus, there's a kind of triumph that we find in the myth of Sisyphus.
But in order to recognize it, you have to look closely.
In her book, The Rise: Creativity, the Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery,
Sarah Lewis intuits the possibilities that come from
reorienting our thinking.
"Discoveries, innovations, and creative endeavors
Often and perhaps even only come from uncommon ground."
And this is precisely how Camus reads the Greek myth.
"When the images of Earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent,
It happens that melancholy rises in man's heart. This is the rock's victory. This is the rock itself."
The rock here is the weight of despair. It's what Milan Kundera caused the unbearable lightness of being.
It's the heaviness that Christ felt when he went to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane on the night that Judas betrayed him.
The gravity of despair enveloped Christ to the point that he sweat drops of blood.
Camus writes, "The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane."
There is power and coming to this point of despair when you recognize that your deepest fears came true and
Camus says "crushing truths perish from being acknowledged."
Jesper Juuls, in his 2013 essay, The Art of Failure, discovers that much of the positive effect of
failure comes from the fact that we can learn to escape from it feeling more competent than we did before.
But we don't escape failure by repressing it, because the trauma will eternally return.
We don't escape failure by running from it because it will catch us.
We don't escape failure by forgetting it.
Because it will remember.
We escaped failure by embracing it.
Triumph and transformation take place when we can embrace our darkest moments and deepest failures
by remembering they are part of who we are.
Whether in life or games, work or play, we remember that failure is the price of participating.
Jan Holmevik in Inter/vention: Free Play in the Age of Electracy
teaches that
"Knowing that there is a goal or destination but not
necessarily knowing exactly what that might be or how to get there is what sets us on the path to discovery."
Jesper Juuls finds this path to discovery in games.
"The elusive space of games is to be protected
But it must always come with an additional license for us to be just a little angry and more than a little frustrated
That - not balanced, but strange arrangement, is games -
the art of failure."
Sisyphus not only defied death literally placing Thanatos in chains,
He revolted against the despair of his existence.
The art of failure is
recognizing with Camus that "There is no sun without shadow and it is essential to know the night" and
In the end, it is up to us to imagine Sisyphus happy.
