In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king who repeatedly tried to cheat death. He even managed, for a time, to imprison Death itself. Later, after finally being taken to the underworld, he devised another scheme that allowed him to return to the world of the living, where he once again refused to die.
Eventually, his punishment became famous.
Sisyphus was condemned to push a massive boulder up a hill. Each time he approached the top, the stone would roll back down.
He would walk down after it.
Then push it again.
Forever.
We get the expression "Sisyphean task" from his story: work that is exhausting, repetitive, and ultimately impossible to complete.
Much later, the philosopher Albert Camus used Sisyphus as a way of thinking about the human condition. If Sisyphus cannot change his circumstances, perhaps he can still change his relationship to them. The gods can control the mountain and the stone. They can ensure that he never accomplishes his apparent goal.
But there is still something they cannot completely control:
What Sisyphus makes of the experience.
Camus famously concluded, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
That got me thinking about another story involving a man and a rock.
There is a Christian parable, often called "Push Against the Rock." It isn't scripture, but I've heard variations of it many times.
In the story, the Lord tells a man to push against a great rock.
So the man does.
Day after day, month after month, year after year, he pushes against that rock with everything he has.
And it doesn't move.
Eventually he becomes discouraged. He tells the Lord that he has done what was asked of him for all this time and has accomplished nothing. The rock hasn't moved even an inch.
The Lord points out what the man hasn't noticed.
Look at your shoulders.
Look at your arms.
Look at your hands.
Look at the strength and endurance you have developed.
Then comes the lesson:
I asked you to push the rock. I never asked you to move it.
The rock hasn't changed.
But the man has.
And that made me think of something considerably less ancient:
The Karate Kid.
Daniel wants Mr. Miyagi to teach him karate.
Instead, Mr. Miyagi apparently decides he has acquired a source of free teenage labor.
Wax the cars.
Sand the floor.
Paint the fence.
Paint the house.
Eventually Daniel gets angry. He has done everything Miyagi asked, but Miyagi hasn't taught him karate.
Then Miyagi starts throwing strikes at him.
"Wax on. Wax off."
"Sand the floor."
"Paint the fence."
And Daniel's body responds.
He has been learning karate the entire time.
Daniel thought the purpose was to finish the chores.
The man in the parable thought the purpose was to move the rock.
Sisyphus thought everything depended upon getting his stone over the summit.
All three are judging the experience by the visible result.
But what if sometimes the most important result isn't what our work does to the thing in front of us?
What if it's what the work does to us?
And I think there's another step beyond that.
The work doesn't only change what we can do.
It can change what we can see.
And eventually, it can change what we want.
The person who begins climbing a mountain chooses a destination based upon what he can see from the bottom.
But climbing changes him.
His legs become stronger. His endurance increases. He learns how to climb.
And then he reaches higher ground and discovers something else.
He can see farther.
There are horizons from there that were invisible when he began.
Maybe that's one reason we shouldn't judge every experience solely by whether we accomplished the goal that originally sent us there.
Sometimes pursuing a goal creates a person who eventually outgrows the goal.
That doesn't necessarily mean the original goal was foolish.
Maybe it was exactly the mountain we needed to climb in order to see the next one.
That thought changes Sisyphus for me, too.
His great sin, in many versions of the myth, is his refusal to accept mortality. He cheats death repeatedly. He treats continuing to live as winning and dying as losing.
And what is his eventual punishment?
Endlessness.
He wanted existence without an ending, and the gods gave him a task without an ending.
Perhaps, if Sisyphus were capable of learning from his punishment, centuries of pushing that stone might eventually teach him something he refused to understand in life:
Not everything that ends has failed.
A day ends.
A season ends.
Childhood ends.
A song ends.
A life ends.
Their endings don't erase what they contained.
Perhaps eventually Sisyphus wouldn't want to cheat death anymore.
He wouldn't need to hurry it or invite it. Life would still be worth living for as long as it was his to live.
But when death eventually came, he could allow it.
Maybe he would finally understand that continuing forever isn't necessarily the same thing as winning.
Perhaps the greatest change produced by pushing the stone wouldn't be that Sisyphus finally became strong enough to move it.
Maybe he would become someone who no longer needed to.
That brings this much closer to home for me.
When I was a young man, there were two things I really wanted.
I wanted to become a professional classical singer.
I imagined opera, choral and concert work, and perhaps Broadway if the opportunity ever presented itself.
And I wanted to be a husband and a dad.
Neither was a bad dream.
I worked toward the first one. I studied music and singing. I learned what serious musicianship requires.
I learned that excellence costs something.
You practice when you would rather not practice.
You repeat something that almost works until it actually works.
You study.
You accept criticism.
You discover weaknesses and work on them.
You keep learning when nobody is applauding.
And while I was still learning what it would take to pursue that first dream, the second one began happening.
I became a husband.
Then I became a dad.
And something changed.
"I want to be a husband and father" wasn't enough anymore.
I wanted to be good at it.
At the same time, the more I learned about the professional singing career I had imagined, the more I understood what pursuing it at the level I wanted could require: rehearsals, performances, auditions, travel, evenings away, instability, and continually arranging life around the needs of the profession.
I came to believe that, for me, I couldn't pursue the professional singing career I had envisioned and also become the kind of husband and father I wanted to become.
So I chose.
I gave up the professional career.
For a long time, I've thought about that simply as choosing one dream over another.
Now I'm not sure that's the whole story.
Because maybe pursuing excellence in the first dream helped teach me how to desire excellence in the second.
Music taught me that wanting something isn't the same as becoming good at it.
Being a singer and becoming a good singer are very different things.
And perhaps when I became a father, some part of me already understood that lesson.
Being a dad and becoming a good dad aren't the same thing either.
If something matters deeply enough, you give something of yourself to become better at it.
So perhaps the years spent pursuing music weren't simply years spent walking toward a destination I eventually chose not to reach.
Maybe that mountain gave me stronger legs.
Maybe it gave me perspective.
Maybe climbing it allowed me to see another horizon more clearly.
President Dallin H. Oaks taught about this in "Good, Better, Best." Some of life's hardest choices aren't between something good and something evil.
Sometimes they're between things that are both good.
And sometimes we have to give up something good in order to choose something better or best.
That doesn't make the good thing bad.
Music wasn't the wrong mountain.
The dream wasn't a mistake.
Perhaps climbing toward it helped me become capable of recognizing what I wanted even more.
That fits with something else President Oaks taught in "The Challenge to Become":
"The gospel of Jesus Christ is the plan by which we can become what children of God are supposed to become."
That word matters to me:
Become.
The gospel isn't merely a plan for accomplishing things.
It is a plan for becoming something.
In Doctrine and Covenants 122:7, the Lord tells Joseph Smith during an unimaginably difficult period:
"All these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good."
Notice that He doesn't say every experience will give us the result we originally wanted.
He says it will give us experience.
And it can be for our good.
Doctrine and Covenants 98 teaches that the Lord gives His children knowledge "line upon line, precept upon precept."
Maybe there are things Heavenly Father cannot meaningfully show us from where we're currently standing.
Not because He's hiding them.
Because we haven't climbed high enough to see them yet.
We want Him to show us the entire map.
Sometimes He gives us the next few steps.
Push the rock.
Wax the car.
Paint the fence.
Practice the scales.
Raise the child.
Serve the person.
Keep the covenant.
Follow Christ today.
Then do it again tomorrow.
And somewhere along the way, something happens.
We become stronger.
But strength may be only the beginning.
We start seeing things differently.
Our priorities change.
Our understanding deepens.
And eventually we may discover that we don't even want exactly the same things we wanted when we began.
I think C. S. Lewis understood something about this.
In Mere Christianity, he compares our relationship with God to a house being renovated. We invite God in expecting Him to fix a few things. At first, the repairs make sense. Then He starts knocking the house about in ways we didn't expect.
Lewis's point is that God isn't merely trying to make our existing little house more comfortable.
He intends to make something much greater of it.
Lewis returns to the same idea when talking about desire. Sometimes our problem isn't that we want too much.
We want too little.
We are limited by what we currently understand enough to desire.
That means God's work in us may include changing our desires themselves.
Maybe spiritual growth can be thought of in three stages:
I can do things I couldn't do before.
I can see things I couldn't see before.
I can desire things I wasn't capable of desiring before.
That third one may be the greatest transformation.
Elder Robert D. Hales taught that discipleship isn't simply a list of things we do. It is a state of being. Following Jesus Christ is ultimately about becoming like Him.
That changes the way I think about goals.
Goals matter.
I don't think the lesson is that we shouldn't make plans because God might change them anyway.
Quite the opposite.
Set goals.
Work.
Practice.
Study.
Push your rock.
Paint your fence.
Climb your mountain.
Pray about what you're doing and give it your best effort.
But don't become so attached to the destination chosen by the person you used to be that you refuse to listen to the person God is helping you become.
Sometimes the goal will still be right, and the work will help us reach it.
Sometimes we'll discover a better way of reaching it.
Sometimes circumstances will prevent us from reaching it at all.
And sometimes we'll climb far enough to realize that we don't want the same destination anymore.
That isn't necessarily failure.
The person standing higher on the mountain has information the person at the bottom didn't possess.
And maybe that's one reason Heavenly Father works with us line upon line.
He isn't simply directing traffic toward predetermined accomplishments.
He's raising His children.
He's teaching us to become.
Looking back now, I don't have to decide that my dream of professional singing was somehow misguided in order to be grateful I chose something else.
It was good.
Music became part of me.
The discipline became part of me.
The pursuit of excellence became part of me.
And even though I ultimately chose not to make professional singing my life's work, I carried what I learned from pursuing it into the life I chose instead.
We don't leave everything we gained on the first mountain when we choose another.
We carry the legs we built climbing it.
That's what I hope my family remembers.
You have goals right now.
Some of them you will accomplish exactly as you imagine.
Some will change.
Some may disappear completely.
There may even be something you currently want desperately that, twenty years from now, you'll be grateful happened differently.
That doesn't automatically make today's work wasted.
So when the boulder doesn't seem to be moving, perhaps there are more questions worth asking than:
"Why haven't I accomplished this yet?"
Ask:
What has this taught me?
What can I do now that I couldn't do before?
What can I see from here that I couldn't see when I started?
And perhaps most importantly:
What do I want now that I have become this person?
Then take that answer to Heavenly Father.
Because maybe the miracle isn't always that He finally moves the boulder.
Sometimes the miracle is that after years of pushing it, we look up and discover a horizon we couldn't see before.
And perhaps we realize that God wasn't only helping us get somewhere.
Through Jesus Christ, He was helping us become someone.
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