The constant striving to truly LIVE and milk from life every last dram of experience takes us scrambling up the mountains of agony and suffering. Some of this pain we choose, some of it is thrust upon us; no matter how suffering comes, our endurance is our show of strength, of life. It is our only game to play. The game of life is not without risk of injury. Perhaps, to make a show of willing ourself past these injuries, and drag ourselves up the mountain anyway, is where true admiration and sense-of-life is. But no-one grows up from being beaten to death in the crib, and even Nietzsche says that you must be gentle with those who have not hardened themselves.

The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is in self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, an instinct. They regard a difficult task as a privilege; it is to them a recreation to play with burdens that would crush all others… When the exceptional man handles the mediocre man with more delicate fingers than he applies to himself or to his equals, this is not merely kindness of heart—it is simply his duty….

Nietzsche, The Antichrist

And what about transformation and growth? Harry Haller starts his life as a suicide and a steppenwolf and learns to be an immortal – a man who lives through the thousand slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and laughs. Nietzsche says you must become the camel, the lion, then, the child (I accept it, I refuse it, I choose it). A camel able to bear anything suffers grievous harm whipped by the winds, frozen by the cold, savoring and struggling until exposure takes it, and as it goes it may rage, but it does not mourn itself. A lion, however, says no, casts off chains, bites the hand that whips it, and is no less mighty for it. A lion is able to treat the source of its suffering but it is not shameful for it to do so, just as it is not shameful for the camel to bear it in peace. And then the child, who laughs, disregards and creates its own rules to live by, does not simply endure the value systems of others or merely refuse to live by them, but creates its own.

There is no shame in protecting yourself from injury to make the climb easier. Part of dancing with boulders is to make them light. That lightness is only partially about strength. Technique, load, and capacity all play a part. In order to “play with burdens that would crush all other men” you must make the boulder unable to crush you. To make the mountain top recreational it cannot kill you on the ascent, even if death on the ascent may have its appeal.

The thing that we seek is not in the “stuff” of what we do. It is not in the damage that we take-on in our pursuits (though, scars and traumas can all become badges of our endurance). What we seek is in our lucid experience. If we accomplish the climb up the mountain but pushed ourselves too hard and retreated into dissociation, we may have endured, but the experience is lost. We were not all there, and we would have been better off taking the easy way and fully inhabiting the experience. The option to take the easy way is the gentleness we all need on the way to becoming who we are. We must never lose sight of the revolt against our own miserable unmaking. We must do our utmost to preserve our lucidity under conditions of absolute reality. That is true endurance.

Ultimately what draws us to scrabbling up the mountain side, cutting our hands, bruising our shins as we – in defiance of our own survival – fling ourselves up slopes of scree, is the unease we find in being comfortable. Without opposition, without something to press into, how can we feel ourselves? how can we know that “we” are real. (depending on who you ask the answer is that “we” are not real.)

Too many peaceful days and we start to struggle against peace. We nearly always know what is most optimal, most advantageous, most healthy, most proper, and we will not do it. Because obeying simple economics of advantage digusts us. A good life is a wretched hell of boredom that obliterates the thinking mind. And so, we make the bad decision, fuck up our own lives, precisely to know that we can. We prove that we are not bound by what is “good”, “polite”, “civilized”, or “prosperous”, only by our own propensity toward emotion, toward feeling. (see Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground.)

Each of us in our own way finds an acceptable dose of intensity to keep our embers warm. We go out, find something that hurts and say “finally! this is something real!” and if we are not careful we let it draw us in until we again lose sensitivity to ourselves, so consumed by the texture of the boulder as it grinds us into the dirt we forget the roughness of our own calluses, forget the clenching of muscle, and the straining of sinew. This too is a kind of bored hell.

I think if Sisyphus is happy when the boulder rolls down the hill and he must walk down after it alone, it is because in that walk alone, he knows himself. Comfort is only comfort if we can hold everything in focus.

I started writing this in a haze of burning out and despair. Work was not going well, I felt busy and overwhelmed and unable to do anything about it. I was trying to convince myself it was ok to pull back and protect myself rather than be flagellated. It’s months later now.