This post is the seventh in a series hosted by UC Berkeley’s TAUG and the Claremont Colleges’ hearhere. In this weekly series, staff writers from both journals will be sharing their perspectives on the COVID-19 global pandemic. Click here for more information on TAUG and here for more information on hearhere.
How long, how long, in infinite Pursuit Of This and That endeavor and dispute? Better be merry with fruitful Grape Than sadden after none, or bitter, Fruit. - Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat XXXIX Two months ago, my world started falling apart after it was hit with a wrecking ball in the form of an email. “Please leave. Don’t come back. See you on Zoom.” Getting kicked off campus was a wake up call to how serious the coronavirus pandemic had become, and in the two months that have followed that fateful email, I watched the outside world fall apart. The thousands of people who fall ill and die daily, the millions who have lost their livelihoods and the thousands more essential workers whose health is compromised are a testament to stark economic inequalities and the drastic under-preparation of most countries’ healthcare systems. In the past two months, I watched my life mirror the outside world and fall apart as well. My carefully ordered life at college unraveled with an alarming swiftness, my seemingly important hustle and bustle on campus morphing into a grey monotony during the lockdown. As the march of days and weeks became indistinguishable from one another, I found myself trifling with various hobbies and watching a string of TV shows in an attempt to fill up the hours. I began reading books and didn’t finish them, started projects half-heartedly and abandoned them a few days later. Simultaneously, the thinly veiled hollowness of my activities sowed doubts as to whether my on-campus obligations had also been mere activities to fill up time, with no inherent purpose of their own. As I attempt to make sense of how the pandemic has disrupted ‘normal’ life both on the individual and collective level, the mythical Greek hero Sisyphus comes to mind. How it must feel to have the rock he was pushing roll back down just as he reached the summit is how I imagine it must be to have our lives scrambled by the pandemic. The individual and collective rocks we had been pushing have started slipping out of our grips and rolling downhill, propelled by rapid changes everyday. For some of us, the rock that we had been pushing uphill was a potential career, a degree, or goals to work towards, now suspended in uncertainty. For me, the rock was a knowable, plan-able future as I prepared to go into my senior year of college. However, considering that I currently have safe shelter and steady access to food and other essentials, the disruption to my life has not been as drastic as for others. All around the globe, students are facing housing insecurity, small business owners have lost their livelihoods, and people have lost loved ones. Many more continue to risk their lives to treat patients and keep our tables supplied with food, even as the healthcare and economic systems they work within are under strain or crumbling. Just like Sisyphus’ punishment to endlessly roll a rock up a hill only to have it fall back down, the social systems and individual lives we carefully build seem doomed to eventually fall apart, leaving us to start over. This time it is a pandemic, but regardless of the cause, human history confirms that lives often get interrupted or derailed, and whole civilizations disintegrate, usually in ways that are out of our control. To see this, we don’t even have to look very far. The 20th century, most of it within the lifetimes of people alive today, was fraught with wars, natural disasters, whole nations dissolving, atrocious genocides, and devastating pandemics. This seeming guarantee that our established ways of life will be knocked asunder reminds me of the conclusions that the author of the book of Ecclesiastes reaches. After surveying human activity under the sun, the Qoheleth (translated Teacher) realises that it is all futile, like chasing the wind. Under the Qoheleth’s critical eye, the pursuit of pleasure, of possessions, of wisdom, and any other activities that we assign special significance to, turn out to be part of an endless cycle of human striving. The generations that have lived before us have had their own rocks to roll uphill, whether it was collective pursuits to advance societies, or individuals’ pursuits to live a fulfilling life. Those rocks have eventually been rolled back down by some global or individual catastrophe. The generations that will come after us will also have their own rocks to roll uphill, whether it is some social ideal to strive for — be it justice or peace, or individual fulfillment and satisfaction. Those generations too will face some calamities, possibly ones even worse than COVID-19, and their rocks will rush downhill. Fully accepting the conclusion that all of human activity is a futile effort to roll rocks up hills distresses me because it removes the gravitas and sense of purpose that I would like to assign to my activities. This is especially true during the lockdown, when the hours and days threaten to blend together. And certainly, other people have found more optimistic ways to interpret these abrupt changes to their life, using their newly free time for much-needed reflection on what truly matters to them and realigning their priorities accordingly. Although I cannot deny that these solutions have given people peace of mind and a restored sense of purpose, they seem shaky to me for the same reason that our initial ways of life were vulnerable to being knocked downhill. Who is to say that these new activities we take up to define ourselves by will not be blown away? How do we structure our lives so that the next set of activities we commit ourselves to, whether as individuals or communities, won’t also start rolling back on us, crushing us in the process? I don’t know that there is an end to this cycle of building and having what we build knocked down, of crafting lives for ourselves only to watch them tumble down, knocked over by an unexpected catastrophe. As I have been straining to figure out how to appropriately respond to the profound sense of untethering this has caused in me, I find myself drawn to Camus’ concluding words in the Myth of Sisyphus: “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill [one]’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Perhaps, we must imagine ourselves happy as well. At first glance, these words smack of the absurd. How could we imagine someone happy when they were condemned to an eternal, purposeless fate? The fact that Sisyphus’ rock is doomed to always roll back down hill is only cause for despair if we define his purpose to be reaching the summit and staying there. As a result, we can never imagine him happy since he is guaranteed to fail over and over. The same goes for us; if we define our purpose by our accomplishments and the permanence of our actions, it becomes difficult to imagine ourselves happy. However, there is another way to live: we can do what Camus suggests and focus on the step by step, allowing the struggle, the everyday business of pushing our rocks, to fill our hearts. The Qoheleth echoes this same view when he “[commends] the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun.” This encouragement to shift our attention to the everyday, ordinary, aspects of being alive is woven throughout the Qoheleth’s reflections about the vapor-like, ungraspable nature of human existence. And over and over, we are reminded that even when we are chasing the wind and not catching it, even when we’re rolling a rock up a hill knowing full well that it will come back down, our hearts can be full. We are allowed to imagine ourselves happy, without any qualifiers. I am still learning what it means to do that. During lockdown, I am starting with resisting the temptation to assign permanent and solid purposes to every single thing I do. Instead, I am learning to find contentment in simple acts of eating and drinking, in calling friends and family, and doing schoolwork for its own sake. As hard as it is, I am imagining myself happy by resting the immediate and the present, and holding my grand purposes for life loosely. The recognition that our activities and ways of life can be knocked out of our hands anytime and rush downhill doesn’t have to stand in the way of finding contentment. Instead, we can walk back down hill and shoulder the rock, ready to begin again, without shackling ourselves to the end result, the attainment of the summit. Once this pandemic has passed and “normal life” has been restored, push with all your might whatever rock you will have picked up, and let the struggle be enough to fill your heart. Thummim Mekuria is a junior at Pomona College majoring in Philosophy and Astrophysics, with a minor in Studio Art.
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This post is the sixth in a series hosted by UC Berkeley’s TAUG and the Claremont Colleges’ hearhere. In this weekly series, staff writers from both journals will be sharing their perspectives on the COVID-19 global pandemic. Click here for more information on hearhere.
Every day for the past three weeks in quarantine I have made my bed after waking up. It’s a very small thing, something that a large percentage of the population already does. However, much to the disdain of my mother, I have always kept a messy room. Three weeks ago, you could probably count on two hands the amount of times I made my bed in the morning. But one day I realized that when my bed was made, it made my room look a lot better, and I felt really good about finally putting the decorative pillows to use instead of letting them collect dust on my floor. Making my bed when I wake up has become something of a habit. The first week I started it, I was aware of what I was doing, that I was taking the time to straighten the comforter and throw a soft blanket on top before arranging the pillows. Now, I wake up and don’t even think about what I’m doing. Instead I think about what I’m getting for lunch (since quarantine usually has me starting my day at noon). If I keep it up, I think to myself, making my bed will become something I can’t start my day without; it will become a subconscious pattern. I am certainly not the only one taking advantage of this time to make little improvements. A quick scan of any social media outlet will show that people have found very creative ways to keep their minds occupied in this season of being stuck inside. People have found new hobbies and invented new challenges in an effort to make the passing days more worthwhile. Contrary to popular belief, though, research suggests that it takes about 66 days to form a habit, not 21. Sixty-six seems like a lot, but the act of ingraining something into a subconscious act takes time and patience. The great thing about creating healthy habits is that it’s never too late to start and it gets a little easier every day. I have been thinking about a few passages in Scripture a lot lately that I think speak to creating one of the healthiest habits of all: positive thinking. In the book of Phillipians, a letter from the apostle Paul, he writes to the church in Philippi saying, “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things" (Phillipians 4:8). In another letter to the church in Corinth, Paul writes, “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 5). It’s pretty obvious that the way we think shapes our everyday lives, and both of these verses speak into that. From a scientific perspective, positive self-talk has been shown to improve confidence, focus, and endurance in everyday life. As college students, it’s easy for us to get trapped by our own negativity and complaints. Berkeley students and students at many elite colleges and universities have a reputation of priding themselves on being miserable. For me personally, it’s easy to tell myself to “think positive thoughts” one moment, then slip back into a circle of negativity the next. The concept of taking every thought captive then seems daunting, especially during this pandemic. Is it really possible to only think about what is true, lovely, and admirable? Alone, we cannot do it. But by God’s grace and through His wisdom, we can form habits even when it seems impossible. The creation of any habit starts with wanting to reach a goal and then making the effort to work toward it. People who run marathons (not me) did not get to where they are overnight. They wake up, train, and make sure they are fueling their bodies well. I am not an expert on running marathons or positive thinking by any means, but I would argue that the process is similar. When you read 2 Corinthians 5:10, we see that every thought has to go through a sort of “test.” It has to jive with the Word of God. If any thought fails that test, we are to actively mold it into something else that will. That is like the “training” aspect of positive thinking. If we can pluck out or reshape the thoughts that are negative or untrue, it stands to reason that more positive thoughts will be the result. We have to “fuel” our minds with the Word of God in order to do this. It would be impossible to inspect each thought without knowing the criteria we are measuring it against. Romans 12:2 says, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—His good, pleasing and perfect will.” In order to rewire our brains to think godly thoughts, the Word of God must renew us every day. Just like it makes me feel good to put my decorative pillows to use, it also gives me joy to be using passages from the Bible to test my thoughts and reframe my thinking. Rather than letting the Bible collect dust on the nightstand, we can use it not only to deepen our relationship with God, but also as the filter that keeps us from falling into destructive downward spirals. If we allow it to, the Bible will remind us what is true, lovely, and admirable. This is not to say that we should not feel and work through all of the bad moments in life. Our emotions are God-given; mourning and grief are certainly valid, especially at a time like this. However, some thoughts are unhelpful, holding us back from what God has in store. Thinking things like, “I am not good enough” and “I can’t do this” doesn’t lead to anything productive. Dwelling on the past and things we can not change has the same effect. In this challenging time, I would argue that it is more important than ever to stay positive. I, along with everyone else, make mistakes every day. Some days, I am really good about controlling my own mind. But there are a lot of days where I allow small things to affect my thoughts, mood, and actions. 2 Timothy 1:7 says, “For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline.” This verse inspires me to rise to the occasion, trusting that God will help me win the war against my own negative thoughts, even if I lose some battles here and there. Sydney Booth is a first-year at UC Berkeley intending to major in Molecular and Cell Biology. |
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