I’m the kid in the center of the photo, pushing our Volvo up the Bolivian Andes in 1960 – Absurd!

Inspired by this week’s guest on my podcast, Nita Sweeney, I have shared recent moments of overwhelm in my own life. And sometimes I find myself wondering what it all means.

I’ve been thinking back to the French existential philosophers I used to study decades ago, when I was young and full of dreams: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and especially Albert Camus.

I remember the first time I read “An Absurd Reasoning,” the leading essay in Camus’ collection The Myth of Sisyphus. I was stunned when he described our lives as similar to the torture of Sisyphus, who was condemned to roll the same stone up the same hill, just to have it roll down again, over and over until the end of time. It seemed so exhausting and pointless and depressing to me back then.

Today, almost four decades later, I am beginning to understand that fully recognizing the absurdity of so much of what we do, allows a kind of abandon and joy to arise. And the overwhelm of it all dissipates when I take all of it less seriously, when I learn to laugh at the incomprehensible strangeness of it all.

Some days I actually find myself happily noticing that I am the absurd hero who willingly keeps pushing my boulder up the mountain every time it rolls down.

My rock is still rolling.