How To Endure
When I was a small child, my father told me the Greek myths while trying to keep me entertained when we were on a long car trip (Yes, this is one of the reasons I am weird.) One of the stories he told me was about Sisyphus, who pissed off Zeus and was then punished by being forced to push a huge boulder up a hill that would back to the bottom whenever he got close to the top. For eternity. Because I was so young when I heard this I had a strong visceral reaction to this story. Eternity? Never succeeding? It is a pretty clear description of futility.
I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear me say that the U.S. Peace Corps will challenge you in many ways, physically, emotionally and psychological. I mean, the motto is “The toughest job you’ll ever love” and honestly, until I became a mother, that was totally true for me. One of the ways that it challenges you is by putting you in a situation where you are vulnerable, alone in a culture whose unspoken rules you do not understand, with people who don’t think like you. You have to live within a foreign culture, on your own, get your basic needs met and try to “help” people who don’t really understand what you are talking about. It was very frustrating.
How do you keep going, keep doing something that is not succeeding, when you feel insufficient for the task at hand, but you somehow must persevere. Even when you have no reassurance that what you are doing will ever be successful, you must forge on, quitting is not an option. Like when you are a new mother with a tiny helpless baby, you have had no sleep, you don’t know what you are doing, and yet you can’t put that baby down, you must find a way to continue. And you do, you do what you have to do.
Before I started working with my host organization in Slovakia, I went up to meet them one weekend. While I was visiting, some of my future co-workers were taking a group on a hike through the mountains (which are very beautiful) and asked if I wanted to join them. Even though I spoke Slovak pretty good for a beginner, I really couldn’t understand them. And actually, I didn’t have enough knowledge or experience to understand what they were talking about. So off I went on an overnight hike with people I didn’t know who don’t speak English. And, it whooped my ass. What I didn’t know was how rugged and steep the mountains and trails in Slovakia were.
I have been thinking a lot about endurance lately. And while googling endurance, I kept seeing posts about courage. And boy oh boy the internet has a lot to say about it, of course, and there are a bunch of uplifting quotes, etc. and as I’ve been looking at it, on the one hand I’m thinking what can I possibly add to all this and also, what a load of crap. Because as someone who has had to endure a lot, I can tell you the most important thing you can do is just show up. And really, at the end of the day what else can you do? Go to sleep at night, get up in the morning, and deal with the situation at hand the best you can.
Something bad is happening and you’re hanging in there. You are not happy, you are categorically miserable, the future looks bleak. There is no end in sight. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, things are going to go from bad to worse. You are never going to be happy again. This is a feeling beyond fear, though, things are so bad, they actually can’t get worse. You have achieved rock bottom. At a certain point things are so bad they are ridiculous, “You think that’s bad? We had a bomb drop on our house and I’m the only survivor!” There can be a quality of absurdity in tragedy.
I discovered Kurt Vonnegut when I was in Junior High School and he had a major influence on my sense of humor. He was hilarious and sardonic, clever and fatalistic, all the stuff that a kid growing up in the 80’s, in the terrifying Cold War, needed. Being young while expecting the powers that be, at any moment, to drop nuclear bombs on your head and destroy all life on Earth requires a sense of irony. You had to be fatalistic. In some ways, climate change is a refreshing environmental disaster because although a lot of humans will die in catastrophic conditions, we don’t really think that it will destroy all life on Earth and it isn’t happening unexpectedly in a moment.
When a death occurs in Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse 5, he writes, “So it goes”. While double checking this, I wound up counting how many times it is written in the book and it turns out to be 111 times. This explains some of the humor in it, the constant repetition, it’s almost silly, except that its about people’s deaths. Gallows humor takes something that scares us and by making it absurd, reduces our dread. Laughter relieves tension, releases endorphins and connects us to each other. It creates space for us to gain perspective, to see a tragic occurrence in context, its a way of right-sizing it. Sometimes when when you stand too close to something it takes up a lot of your field of vision and your perception is be distorted. As Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning, humor “can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation”.
In addition to making one’s own life more bearable, humor has been used for centuries to fight the power. Black comedy, in particular, strengthens the morale of the oppressed and undermines that of the oppressor. From Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to the Russian protest group, Pussy Riot, humor has been used to rankle rulers. As journalist Masha Gessen has written, jokes “reclaim the power to define –and inhabit—reality” when people feel powerless. Laughter can strengthen our ability to take on what we fear while bringing us closer to our allies. And even better, autocrats really hate it!