Imagine Sisyphus Doing the Dishes

For one minute the sink was empty. Everything washed, dried, put away, the counter wiped, the whole small kingdom in order. And then it was dinner, and the plates came out, and the pans, and the glasses, and by the time the evening was over the sink was full again, the exact same plates, the same water going gray, the same task waiting, as it had waited yesterday and would wait tomorrow, forever, for the length of an entire life.

There is a particular despair that lives in repetitive work, and the dishes are its patron saint. Not because washing dishes is hard. It is easy. It is that it is never done. You do not finish the dishes. You only do the dishes, and then do them again, and the not-finishing is the thing that grinds, the sense of pushing a weight up a hill only to watch it roll back down so you can push it up again, every single day, with nothing to show for it but a brief empty sink and the certainty that it will fill.

The Greeks had a figure for exactly this, a man condemned to roll a boulder up a mountain for eternity, and every time he neared the top the boulder rolled back down, and he walked down after it and started again, forever. They meant it as the worst punishment they could imagine, a labor with no completion and no point, the pure distilled horror of effort that never arrives anywhere. It is a good description of a Tuesday.

A French writer looked at that old punishment and said something that has been rattling around ever since. He said we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Not resigned, not numb, but happy, and the reason was strange and worth sitting with. The torture of the boulder was never the boulder. It was the man's relationship to the boulder, his conviction that the task was beneath him, that it was robbing him of the real life happening somewhere else, that he was owed an arrival he was being denied. Change that, and the same boulder becomes something else.

Because the repetition was never the punishment. The resentment of the repetition was. The dishes are not grinding you down. Your belief that you should be somewhere else, doing something that counts, while your real life leaks away into a sink, is what grinds you down. The task is neutral. The suffering is the story you tell about the task, the one where it is beneath you and stealing from you and keeping you from the life you were meant to have, which is happening, you are sure, to other people, somewhere with no dishes in it.

There is no such place. That is the quiet turn. There is no version of a life with no boulder, no sink that stays empty, no arrival at a state of permanent doneness after which the real living begins. The dishes are not the interruption of the life. They are the life, or a good part of it, the ordinary recurring maintenance that any life is mostly made of, and the person waiting for it to be over so they can start living is going to wait forever, because it is never over, and it was never supposed to be.

So the move, the only move, is the one the French writer pointed at. To stop waiting for the boulder to stay put. To claim it. To decide, standing at the sink, that this, too, is your life and not a theft from it, that the warm water and the clean plate and the small order restored are not nothing, are in fact most of what there is, and that a person can find something like peace, even something like contentment, in the endless ordinary task, once they stop insisting they were meant for a life without one.

The sink filled again that night. It would fill again tomorrow. And the person standing over it, hands in the warm water, decided, for once, not to resent the boulder, and found that the boulder, unresented, was just a sink, and the evening was just an evening, and the life, dishes and all, was quietly, sufficiently, enough.

⁂

Perhaps while reading this you thought of your own boulder, the recurring task that is never finished, and the low grind of it, which is so often less about the task than about the sense that you should be somewhere else.

I wonder whether the repetition was ever really the punishment, or whether it was always the resentment of it, the conviction that our real life is happening elsewhere while we push the same weight up the same hill.

You might, at the next endless ordinary task, try setting down the belief that you were meant for a life without one. There is no such life. The boulder, unresented, turns out to be just a boulder, and the ordinary recurring work turns out to be most of what a life is actually made of, and it can, once you stop fighting it, be enough.