Blessed Be Thy Burden

Your burden is all the stuff that, if you stop doing it today, your world starts falling apart tomorrow. If you stop eating, you start getting hungry. If you stop bathing, you start getting stanky. If you stop parenting your kids, you start dealing with little monsters. If you stop paying your mortgage, you start living under a bridge. Does that make food your enemy? Or your career or your kids? Not really, they’re just your dreamstate burden. We all have our job to do.

Your burden is the load you bear; the containing, inward-pressing element that defines you and gives you shape and meaning, or, at least, the illusion thereof. An engine that operates with no load to contend against will spin out of control and blow up, or so I’m told. (My burden is very light, and I have yet to explode.) You have your load to bear, I have mine, and everyone we know has theirs. 

Sisyphus was cursed by the gods to spend eternity rolling a stone up a hill, only to have it roll back down every time he neared the top. This is how Albert Camus illustrated the absurdity of life in The Myth of Sisyphus, concluding that; The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy. The reason we must imagine Sisyphus happy is that we are him. The fact that pushing the stone is absurd in its utter pointlessness is no reason not to do it; everything in a dreamstate is pointless and absurd. 

An aerosol can is pressurized by the compressed energy of its contents. The can exerts no inward pressure, it only resists the outward pressure exerted by the gas. Once you eliminate the pressure by releasing the gas, that container-contained-containment triality is rendered inoperable; containment is gone because contained energy is dissipated, and the container goes in the trash. You, as an amorphous, gas-like being, need a container and containment to give you shape and substance. You need to push outward without dissipating back into your natural element, which means you need something to push back. In the case of liquid or gas, the container. In the case of Sisyphus, the boulder. In the case of you, your burden.

When you’re not in alignment with your authentic pattern, your burden might seem like a millstone around your neck, an anchor dragging you to lightless depths. Once you come into alignment and have rearranged your life accordingly, however, your authentic burden becomes your purpose and will seem like no burden at all. Gravity is reversed at that point, so the stone that was pushing you down is now raising you up. That’s not just spiritual playtime happy-talk, but the human experience as it was meant to be; still pointless and absurd, but way more comic than tragic.

I don’t have much of a burden, but I am unspeakably grateful for what I do have. I get a little confused and saddened when I see people who fail to feel gratitude toward their burden. Obviously, some burdens are too much, but most are within our tolerance, if only barely. Whether it’s a mountain of debt, a handbag addiction, a bunch of blood-thirsty little ninja dudes, or just a standard set of family/householder obligations, your burden performs a crucial and defining role in your life. Are you contending against evil in some form? That’s good, and if you super-dooper hate that evil, even better. Fighting evil is one of the things that strong emotions are good for; angry rock-pushing, manic plate-spinning, all-caps tweeting; wishy-washy emotions do not a heavy boulder push. You can hate your burden, be disgusted by it, punch it in the tummy and kick it in the groinal region, but every now and then, you should take a step back and thank it too; pause and bow to your opponent. If only silently, and only occasionally, rise above the fray and express gratitude to the adversary, because whether or not you can see it through the yellow dust or red mist, your burden is doing you a service, and gratitude expressed always blesses the bestower. 

At the time of this writing, people seem to be getting more and more polarized; taking sides against each other, as if our burden was our fellow herdmates. What’s got us so worked up? What’s gotten into us? (I, like General Jack Ripper, blame a decades-long conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids, but what do I know? Maybe we’re just kooky.) Do we hate our own tribemates? Is civil war brewing? Stranger things have happened. Antipathy, discordance and misalignment may not be good for you, but they’re great for drama, so as long as you remain on the stage, expect to be swept up in events and shaped by external forces. The trick to living your own life is to go solo; detach from the drama of the moment, slip out the backstage door and into the oh-so-scary night. The dramatic production represents a pattern not your own, and you won’t find your own on any stage. Anyone fulfilling a pattern not their own, however contentedly or ably, can be likened to a host controlled by a parasite. The zombified host might serve a purpose, and even might be happy with their lot, but their life is not their own, and for some of us, that’s a red line.

Can you abandon your duty? Sure, you can simply die, as you certainly will, and your burden will be redistributed among your surviving herdmates, or left to dry up and blow away. Or, you can just walk off and let the chips fall where they may; let all those spinning plates just crash and smash. You can just call an Uber right now and have it take you to the nearest bridge you can jump off or live under. In the end, the only one containing and constraining you is you. Your relationship with your burden is a partnership, a dance, a folie à deux. Take a step back and look at your situation objectively, as if from a million-mile view or a billion-year perspective, as if from beyond the grave, and try to see it for the nonsense it is – and rest assured, it’s all nonsense. 

We (alleged) humans have infested this planet for a long-ass time, at least since last Thursday, and the one thing we all have in common, besides the love of cakes and pies, is that we all operate under load. We all have our boulder to push, our plates to spin, our burden to shoulder. Our earliest ancestors had to think about their next meal, among other things. They had to hunt and kill, or find something someone else killed and suck out whatever marrow and brain matter was left behind. I’m sure they’d’ve preferred to use DoorDash and do pizza and Netflix every night, but they had a lot to worry about, including their own brains and marrow being on someone else’s menu. We all have our loads to bear.

You are a shapeless being with an indwelling urge to reconnect with the Great Whatever from which you are presently separated. You feel an urge to expand, but without containment, you would simply dissipate back into the surrounding atmosphere and cease to exist as a discrete dreamstate entity, like air in a balloon floating in endless sky. Eventually, the balloon will leak or break and you’ll return to your true state, immortal but unindividuated. When containment is gone, so are you.

You can’t always see your situation clearly when you’re down in the thick of it, but when you have a quiet moment, try to rise above it and see things in a more objective, less emotional light. This is just a form of seeing, if only squinting, and if only for a moment. My advice is similar to Nietzsche’s admonition to love your fate: amor fati. I don’t know about loving your burden, or even liking it, but maybe try to acknowledge and respect it, even if you consider it an enemy or oppressor. People who can rise above the choking yellow dust of the herd develop a natural, authentic sense of humor; not the laugh-out-loud kind, but the gentleness and generosity of spirit that arises from perceiving the absurdity of your situation, and that of others as well.

Repeat after me:

Dear Big-Ass Rock, I wish to take this moment out from our long-running battle to thank you, for although I resent you, maybe even hate you, and wish to be done with you, I also realize that you give my life shape and purpose, and that it’s you that allows me to perform my function with emotional investment, thus maintaining the illusion that I am somehow significant. I may despise and resent you, Big-Ass Rock, but I also appreciate all you do for me. Where would I be without you?

P.S. You left the seat up again.