Perhaps you, too, have something in common with a tyrannical mythological king?

When you manage to anger the gods, they do manage to come up with some rather unusual punishments. Especially in Greek mythology. Especially if your name is Sisyphus. 

Sisyphus was a tyrannical king whose misguided actions earned him an eternity of rolling an immense stone up a steep hill only to have the stone roll back down the hill as he got close to the top. And when it hit the bottom, once again he’d push that stone back up the hill until it rolled back down yet again. Yes, for eternity. Pushing the same rock up the same hill repeatedly, always with the same results. A rather cruel way to spend the remainder of forever.

I’ve had my share of pushing things up hills. Of pushing rocks up hills only to discover they were the wrong rocks being pushed up the wrong hills. Pushing, hoping that maybe this time the results would be different, that maybe if I simply got better at pushing the wrong situations, relationships, or needed outcomes up the hills of my life this time would finally yield the results I desired.

And they never did. 

Expecting different results from doing the exact same thing never produces different results. The physics of disappointment. Yet how often do we continue to push and hope, forcing what shouldn’t be forced and sentencing ourself to a lifetime of our own self-induced futility in the process.

Often we know we are pushing the wrong rock up the wrong hill, but we continue to push because that’s all we’ve ever known to do. We accept and expect the struggle because it’s always been a struggle, as if some fate we’ve been made to carry as we navigate the challenges of life. 

Sisyphus never controlled his fate. He was given the one stone to continuously push up that one mountain. Forever.

We, though, get to decide what we are willing to push and where we are willing to push it to. And while we may be habitually inclined to keep doing what we’ve always been doing, we simply don’t have to keep doing what habitually has never worked.

It doesn’t have to be a struggle.

Maybe it’s time to stop pushing those wrong stones up those wrong hills?

Photo by Valeriia Miller on Unsplash