Sisyphus. Condemned king of legend. Trickster who deceived the gods. He’s like the O.J. Simpson of mythology—less famous for his crimes than for his capture and punishment. He’s a boogieman to remind us that the only thing in this world that is truly infinite is impotent desire. The cruelest of punishments is not to go without. It’s to go without, when plenty is right there for the having. It’s the definition of maddening. That’s what they did to Sisyphus. They made him go mad.
This is a counter story.
The water is there, frigid from the high mountains. You dip your head to quench a thirst that is fire in you. And then. “No. No, not again.” There are only dry stones.
Frantic, you try again and again. Plunging yourself into a world that can promise but not deliver. You run madly up and down the length of the riverbed, diving periodically into pools that are not pools until you are bloodied by a deceitful world.
At last you lie down, spent. There is a quiet of dying around you. There is comfort in that quiet, and the chill of the failing light. The night comes and with it a sliver of moon. The echo of a verdant land once again comes to dream drenched senses. The sound of water as it rills between the stones. The whisper of willows.
You stir. You creep forward. Slowly. Very slowly. Slow as the approach of a wild thing, or the approach of the one who would tame it. The two approaches, you realize, are the same. Slow and attentive.
As you come close, the water again disappears. Only rock and sand. But this time, only the sight of it. The sound of it still comes to you. How strange. The sound of water in a lifeless, bone dry country.
You wait. You wait until your mind aches with waiting. Then again, quite suddenly, the moonlight glimmers on the surface of water. Gently you exhale the night and proceed, your belly serpentine in the long grass. Closer. Even slower. Bending time, so as not to break it.
That’s the counter story to unquenchable desire. That’s how you stop going mad. You slow down. Want to meet your wild and precious life? Try the crawling, twitching, wide-eyed pace of a wild thing pit in the balance of fear and desire. When desire is stronger than fear, the world flees from you. When fear is stronger than desire. Well then, that’s when you give up. You can’t run from the world. It’s the only one you’ve got.
There’s an unintuitive, but perfectly sound logic to all this. If you want quenching, learn to tolerate your thirst. If you crave freedom, accept your shackles tight about your ankles. You can’t run. Not yet. You can’t even walk. What you will one day do will only be known if today you do what you are able to sustain. No less. No more. That’s what finding your edge means. It means finding the exact amount of free action that you can really, actually, sustain.
Let me put this another way. Finding the waters of life—of your life—means giving up on breakthroughs. There won’t be a breakthrough. If there were going to be one—well—you’d have broken through by now. You’re praying for a break because crawling all that way seems just about unbearable when you’re so thirsty. Because crawling that slowly seems absurd. Like listening to the podcast of your life at ten percent speed, the droning of your frustration drawn out into ridiculous distortion.
Still, you sense that if you move at the pace of trust, then a foot traveled is a foot gained. You’ve always felt this. Before words. Below them. You want ground you can hold and water you can drink. It’s freedom—a mustard seed of hard-earned, bonafide faith. If you make a break for it, you’ll pull up hard on the end of your halter. Very hard. You’ll be thrown back and lose ground. The water will dry as you palm it. You’ll cement a little deeper the belief that there isn’t a way out. That you’re doomed to play the same joyless game endlessly.
So. No break throughs. No revelations. No sprint to freedom. You’re going to have to move at the speed of trust. The speed of the most frightened, resistant, distrustful part of you.
So that’s the bad news. What’s the good news? Because there’s actually a lot of good news. I had to tell you the bad news first for the good news to get in. If I told you the good news first you’d probably guess the bad news and that would distract you from paying attention. So take a moment to accept that you’re going to have to move much slower than you want to. So slow in fact, that you’ll likely need to give up on your goals altogether for the time being. If you’re in a Sisyphean dilemma, goals aren’t nearly as helpful as people think they will be.
With that disclaimer out of the way, here’s the first piece of good news. It’s about Sisyphus and the undrinkable water. There’s good news that it’s vital you believe. I can’t overstate how important this is.
The water is real.
That’s the good news. You can actually be free. You can have what you crave. What people always crave, when you get down to it, is to be loved and to be free. Because love loves and freedom frees, neither are scarce resources. Your deepest desires aren’t a mirage, even when they seem to behave like one. Even though satisfaction disappears every time you dip your head to partake. Even though your every attempt to love or be loved ends in disaster. Even though the whole idea seems trumped up after a while.
The water is real. When you hear it chattering over stones or thundering in the distance, that’s real. The voice calling you is as real as you are. And it’s close. Close as a whisper. The problem with Sisyphus isn’t with the water. It’s not even with Sisyphus, whose thirst is equally real. The problem is with method. You can’t push a string. You can’t take time back. And you can’t love through force. It’s just method, that’s all. There’s not even a bad guy or a hell or anything to make your suffering “meaningful”. It’s not particularly meaningful. You’re just employing the wrong tool for all the usual reasons.
But there’s more good news. That agonizing, crawling speed of trust… is also the speed of pleasure. It’s the speed at which you’re able to let pleasure in. The tragic thing about Sisyphus is that he’s actually splashing his face in water, but it doesn’t do him any good. If he keeps it up, he’ll end up stealing other people’s water out of pure craving. And still, it won’t quench him. You really can’t force love. You can only wait for it. You can only speak to it in soothing tones, inviting it to come out, because it’s safe now.
When you move at the speed of trust, you start to receive almost immediately. Sure, it’s slower than you’d like. But it’s real. Love starts working on you right away. That crawling descent to the water is actually punctuated by little rills of nourishment and the tingling pleasure of anticipation. Yes, it’s hard to be with the feeling of exactly how stuck you still are. But it feels unquestionably good to move at the pace of you. The forcing was always abuse. It was abuse when other people forced you and it was abuse when you kept on forcing yourself. It feels good to stop being abused.
I think because of this pleasure element, it’s most often found that people grow faster than they expect, once they can tolerate starting slower than they can imagine. Once you move at the speed of trust, trust grows. Then you can move a little faster.
After going so, so slow for a few minutes or hours or days, you ask whatever distrustful part is active today “can we go a little faster”? If there’s no hint of blame in the question—if it’s really only a question—you’d be surprised how often the answer is a slightly shaky, but enthusiastic “ok, let’s try it”.
A word of caution, if you think you deserve the yes or if you feel that “no” is un-brave. If you insist on a yes or tip the scale at all, you’ll get a yes. You’ll cruse right past your no, ramming forward only to crash once again into that blunt feedback instrument called reality. Forcing a yes is a lot more damaging than overriding a no. It’s a deeper kind of abuse. There’s no hatred, like the hatred of the person who finds that the consent they forced on another was disingenuous. The same is true within yourself. Self forcing is the root chakra of self-hatred.
Freedom is found when you move at the speed of trust, always listening for that pulse in the body which means “no” or “slow down”. Listen even more closely. Often the quiet no’s aren’t quiet at all. They’re screaming so loud that people across the room (who know how to look) can see it in the set of your jaw or shoulders or the furtive glance in your eye. You’ve just learned not to hear.
And listen to “yes”. To pleasure. Especially the shaky, tentative yes. It might be the yes that guides your life one day, once it has a voice. You’re learning. You’re a mystery to yourself. That’s ok, slow down and listen. A bit of humility goes a long way. Going faster isn’t worth the risk of missing some part that isn’t ready and abandoning or suppressing yourself all over again.
When you move at the pace of the most distrustful part of you, you bring all of you along. A lot of people choose between freedom and wholeness. When you move at the pace of trust, you don’t have to give up either. The way, the dharma as it’s called, is to take it slow and listen. Be honest that while where you are is hard, it’s actually bearable. If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be here bearing it. It really does get better, once you can slow down and be with what’s here now. Just give it a little time.