At least once a year I read The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. Sisyphus is immortalized by his punishment in the underworld – “ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight.”

The gods had thought, Camus explains, “that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”

And one can imagine why such an existence would be punishment. Futile and hopeless labor. Pushing with all your might to accomplish something. And accomplishing nothing. Trying again, perhaps more forceful than before. Aiming for that peak. Fighting to meet that goal. And accomplishing nothing.

How long could you go on?

Camus is interested in Sisyphus’ decent. “That return, that pause…That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering.” That moment, Camus says, “that is the hour of consciousness.”

And consciousness is what makes Sisyphus tragic. Alas, he “knows the whole extent of his wretched condition.”

Yet consciousness is also Sisyphus’ victory.

“At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock…His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing.”

According to Camus, that long decent, with its moments of pause, of thought, of reflection, those are his moments of victory.

I like to take it further.

There are two moments for Sisyphus that interest me. At the top of the hill, Sisyphus turns to watch his rock effortlessly fall down the slope he effortfully just pushed it up.

Then he goes down the hill.

At the bottom of the hill, Sisyphus looks up at the peak he and his rock just returned from.

Then he sets himself, and begins to push.

Those are the moments that interest me. The story of Sisyphus has no villains. No harpies plucking out his eyes or monsters threatening his fate. There is only Sisyphus and his rock.

The gods think they forced Sisyphus to this fate. They decreed his punishment and so it must be so.

But Camus is right – his fate belongs to him. Sisyphus chooses to push his rock. Neither man nor god can force it upon him. The rock is his alone to chose.

I imagine Sisyphus to know the wretched state of his condition throughout his struggle, not only in those subtle moments of silent decent. He sets his shoulder against the stone knowing the outcome. Knowing the rock will fall. Knowing it will happen again and again and again.

And Sisyphus pushes anyway.

Indeed, “these are our nights of Gethsemane.”

We all of us have our burdens to bear, our rocks to push. And while at times these burdens may feel forced upon us by a merciless or unjust world, they are ultimately ours to choose.

But the alternative is far worse. “There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.”

To avoid our rocks is to avoid the world. To shut ourselves off from all that is around us. To will ourselves into the inky void of unconsciousness, where the weight of the world can’t follow.

Camus’ Sisyphus chooses consciousness. He pushes his rock, embracing the pain and hardship that come with his toil. “There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn,” and indeed, Sisyphus scorns his so-called punishment – reveling in the blood, sweat and tears which tell him plainly that, in the underworld though he may be, he is very much alive.

So, yes, we “must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

As he stands on that peak, watching his rock roll away, I imagine him taking a deep breath, narrowing his eyes, and gritting his teeth. Then, hardened and focused, prepared for his descent and the grueling ascent to follow, I imagine Sisyphus says himself, a wry smile on his lips, “Okay, then. Let’s do this.”

Tonight, Tisch College and Tufts University, where I have the privilege to work, are hosting General Stanley McChrystal for a Service and Leadership Symposium.

The event this evening will officially launch a new initiative: Tufts 1+4. As  a story in today’s Tufts Now explains:

Tufts 1+4 will provide a structured year of full-time national or international service before students begin their four years of undergraduate study here. The program will begin in the fall of 2015.

Enjoy!

With all the snowy days – and particularly all the icy days that follow – I’d like to propose a new business idea to make winter travel a little easier for all of us.

I call it Zip-Barrow.

Or perhaps not, as that might qualify as copyright infringement. But you know those wheelbarrows built so as to disperse salt as they pass? Apparently they are called Salt Spreaders, but perhaps everyone else already knew that.

On these icy days, I’ve seen several salt spreaders. On the campus where I work, for example, they use them on most of the walkways, and it seems like quite the efficient method for de-icing a slippery slope.

But not so with private, residential walks.

And with this pattern of snowing, freezing, melting, freezing, snowing, etc there has been many a time lately when I’ve tiptoed on a walk made icy by the sheer forces of nature – despite the better attempts of homeowners to keep the path safe.

So I thought perhaps I should get a salt wheelbarrow, as I call them, to push around town with me. Salting as I go.

But this is an imperfect solution. For one thing, I bet I’d go through a lot of salt. Then I’d have to figure out how to store the wheelbarrow at home or the office. And, of course, the ultimate path cleared by my wheelbarrowing efforts would be relatively minimal.

Enter Zip-Barrow. Or perhaps Salt Share.

Pick up a salt spreaders (and some salt, of course) at a local hardware store, push it a few blocks then return it to another hardware store. Chip in, perhaps, the cost of one bag of salt. In return, you get a salted path to where you’re going while others salt other paths. Then together, we will clear our sidewalks of ice.

Wouldn’t that be nice?

Someone once told me that only one out of every hundred ideas is a good idea. This might be one of the ninety-nine. But now you know what I think about as I try not to fall.

Growing up in northern California, at a small public school nestled among the redwoods, we used to frequently have all school assemblies where we would discuss upcoming issues and topics of note. Some other day I’ll tell you all about this magical three room school house that grew from 50 to 75 students over the nine years I attended.

But, today, I’ll share the story that one teacher used to share with us during all school assemblies just past the days of early February.

St. Valentine was a kind man, he told us.

St. Valentine was a Catholic priest in a time and place that was venomously anti-Catholic. The state had outlawed Catholic marriages on the theory that if a good Catholic isn’t married…he or she cannot reproduce.

But St. Valentine believed in love, so he held private wedding ceremonies, consecrating the love of his brethren in darkened caves, hidden from the eyes of the state. But St. Valentine was discovered. He was caught and imprisoned and told he would answer for his crimes.

St. Valentine was a kind man. All the neighborhood kids loved him and missed him and wanted him to be free. So they wrote little notes of encouragement and dropped them through the bars. And the notes fell down into the pit where St. Valentine was imprisoned – this is where the idea of sending “valentines” came from.

St. Valentine read these notes and he was deeply moved by the love of his community.

Then he was beheaded.

~The end~

Perhaps this story was the inspiration for Game of Thrones. I couldn’t say. And perhaps it’s because I heard this story every year for eight years, but – I always found Valentine’s Day a little weird.

I mean, I’m pretty snarky about love to begin with, but then you add on a dude beheaded for his religious beliefs and…I don’t think I’ll ever figure this day out.

I spent some time today talking about political affiliations – and how complex they can be.

No one is as simple as a “left” or a “right.” But do more axes more accurately describe a person?

The Political Compass aims to address the “overly simplistic” one-dimensional model by adding another axis – a spectrum of authoritarian to libertarian. It’s a fun quiz, and the results are interesting. Go ahead and check it out.

While this quiz is great and the model is helpful, it somehow feels…insufficient. Four boxes are better than two, but it still doesn’t change the fact that at the end of the day you’re getting put in a box.

And maybe that’s unavoidable to some extent. You really can’t talk about groups of people or about changes and trends without putting people in boxes. But these static boxes support – or may lead to – polarization. It can be a helpful heuristic, no doubt. But is boxing people really the optimal solution?

Even a complex system – with say, 16 boxes instead of 2 – just puts people in neater, more well-defined boxes.No one puts Shugars in a corner, and I don’t really like the idea of being in a box either. My opinions and politics are subtle, varied, complex, and changing.I wonder if we could come up with continua that accounted not only for different aspects of politics – whether you’re authoritarian or libertarian, individualistic or collective – but accounted for shifts in those opinions.What situations make you act selfishly? Which make you act selflessly? What personal flaws do you have that you wish you could overcome? I have my ideals, but I also have my realities, and both make me the person that I am. If we could capture these complex, changing, subjective views…well, it might be too complicated to be practical, but it should would be interesting.

“The first step,” someone said to me today, “is to not hyperventilate.”

That seems like generally a good place to start.

But it’s not always an easy place to start. Projects seem so monumental. Objectives so overwhelming, that it’s easy to go straight to panic mode when faced with the monumental.

In most of my work, this is challenge is relatively easy to overcome. Experience has taught me the guideposts and given me capacity to prepare for multiple contingencies.

Right now, for example, I am chairing the event committee for The Welcome Projects’ YUM: A Taste of Immigrant City event (save the date: April 10!). This is a relatively large fundraiser, with lots of people involved and lots of moving parts. But since this is my third year chairing, and since I’ve planned other events, I know more or less what to expect. There’s a lot of work involved, sure, but overall it’s not too stressful. I can take it piece by piece, working with a great team to put it all together.

And this type of strategy is also applied to community organizing.

You don’t start just trying to change the big thing on day one. You start with a little thing. A tangible project. You talk to people, get others involved, and grow your movement. You celebrate every victory. And you slowly chip away at your larger goal. Change takes time.

That’s all well and good, but the challenge is making sure your little victories really do culminate in the big change you are looking for.

Shifting culture is not the same as planning an event. You can gain experience from organizing and learn important lessons from historic progress, but there’s no 1-year checklist that you complete in order to meet your goal. There’s not event a 10 year checklist.

Our communities and our cultures are constantly changing. Sometimes for the better, and sometimes for the worse. And you need to focus on that big picture to ensure social change efforts are on the right track.

But don’t hyperventilate. Just take it piece by piece.

Can democracy truly flourish in a capitalist system?

In Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons, Peter Barnes argues that “…government puts the interests of private corporations first. This is a systemic problem of capitalist democracy, not just a matter of electing new leaders.”

Essentially, the people who have money have power, so government – while perhaps intended to level the playing field – will ultimately end up favoring those with power.

A recent political cartoon from Ted Rall gets to a similar point, asking with more than a little snark, “Is poverty a feature or a bug?”

Even proponents of capitalism eye our widening economic gap with growing concern. Perhaps (or perhaps not) America was once a place where anyone could grow up to be anything and where pulling yourself up by your bootstraps was a viable strategy. But if such an America ever existed, it’s becoming increasing clear that it is no more.

Childhood poverty is an indicator of adult poverty, particularly if you are black. A longitudinal study by Caroline Ratcliffe and Signe-Mary McKernan showed that “while 4 percent of individuals in nonpoor families at birth go on to spend at least half their early adult years living in poverty, the comparable number for individuals born into poverty is 21 percent. This 18 percentage-point difference is driven by blacks; the difference for blacks is 24 percentage points, while the difference for whites does not differ significantly from zero.”

So if the current system is broken, what is the solution?

Conservatives might argue that our system of capitalism has been corrupted – that lessening government regulation and lowering taxes would create a purer form of capitalism which would then naturally correct our inequities.

Liberals might argue that our system has been corrupted by capitalism – that increasing government regulation and bolstering social programs would create a society that would be more fair.

Barnes argues that both market and state solutions are half-right and half-wrong. Instead he advocates for a “commons sector” a twin-engine to the corporate sector that would be composed of “institutions that preserve shared inheritances, charge corporations for degrading nature, or boost the ‘demanding’ power of people whose basic needs are ignored.”

In his vision, this sector would balance the power of corporations with power for the people – and power for future generations. It would keep corporations, and government regulation, in check, and lead to a relatively equitable system where everyone can prosper.

Efforts like this are underway in the real world.

Independent Sector is a coalition of nonprofits, foundations, and corporate giving programs committed to advancing the common good in America. Third Sector New England provides capacity building programs and services for individual nonprofits and the nonprofit sector. New Profit Inc is a venture philanthropy fund that invests in social entrepreneurs.

The White House’s Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation is tasked with engaging the social sector – individuals, non-profits, foundations – as well as business and government – to find new ways to solve old problems and drive collaboration to make greater and more lasting progress in meeting the challenges our Nation faces.

These are good efforts, lead by thoughtful people and showing promising results.

And yet I remain skeptical.

As someone said to me today, the commons sector solution feels like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. It might be good, but it is not enough.

There is staggering inequality in this country, and that inequality is deeply entrenched. Being born in poverty doesn’t just impact how much financial capital you have access to later in life, it impacts how you see yourself, how you advocate – or don’t advocate – for yourself. How you share your opinions in public settings, how you participate – or don’t participate in democracy.

Poor people are treated as invisible, and there’s only so much of that you can take before you begin to believe it yourself.

Adults who think their opinion doesn’t matter have no value to a democracy. But they do have a value to capitalism,

And, perhaps, adults who think their opinions do matter – while the life blood of democracy – present a real threat to capitalism.

Ultimately, social theory comes down to core questions about the nature of mankind. One such question is whether people are inherently self-interested or inherently altruistic. Rational choice theory tends to dominate this discussion, pointing generally to self-interest as a core human motivator.

This issue comes up frequently in the work of Elinor Ostrom, a pioneer in commons research who showed that people can work together to successfully sustain limited, shared resources. As Thomas Dietz, Nives Dolsak, Elinor Ostrom, and Paul Stern write in Drama of the Commons:

All of the analyses just sketched presume that self-interest is the only motivator and that social mechanisms to control self-interest, such as communication, trust, and the ability to make binding agreements, are lacking or ineffective. These conditions certainly describe some interactions. People, sometimes do, however, move beyond individual self-interest. Communication, trust, the anticipation of future interactions, and the ability to build agreements and rules sometimes control behavior well enough to prevent tragedy. So the drama of the commons does not always play out as tragedy.

I find this passage intriguingly skeptical.

Ostrom traveled the world, finding communities where groups of people successfully self-governed resources for centuries. She of course also found many examples of unsuccessful governance, but somehow those stories seem less surprising.

So dominate is the narrative of rational self-interest, that – with good reason – people often refer to Ostrom’s work with a sense of renewed hope in humanity. Collaboration can work!

Compared to this tone, it seems almost pessimistic to say that certain factors “control behavior well enough to prevent tragedy.” As if tragedy is indeed the norm, but carefully constructed contexts and prevent it.

Jurgan Habermas, on the other hand, is exceeding optimistic about people’s capacity. As James Finlayson describes, to Habermas the model of self-interest results in

A false picture of society as an aggregate of lone individual reasoners, each calculating the best way of pursuing their own ends…In Habermas’ eyes, such approaches neglect the crucial role of communication and discourse in forming social bonds between agents, and consequently have an inadequate conception of human association.

To Habermas, communication was a moral imperative. It wasn’t just a tool that could “control behavior” and keep people in line. It was a way of learning, of growing, of deeply changing who you are.

If you enter a conversation intentionally committed to not being self-interested, if you are genuinely interested in learning about others and understanding their points of view, then the act of communication changes you.

And if we all entered conversations open-minded and intentionally not self-interested, then we’d all change together. Not in a creepy, Borg collective, we’re all the same person kind of way, but in a deeply bonded fellowship kind of way.

We’d all still be ourselves, all individual and unique, but the sum of our collective reasoning would be greater then an aggregate of each of us alone.

I’ll admit that BuzzFeed is a guilty pleasure of mine. I mean, as much as I don’t really care about 22 signs you were an 80s kid, I’m probably going to read that article when as I’m looking for a little mindless entertainment to wind down from the day. And it’s kind of too bad the online quiz is making a comeback, because…I can’t stop taking online quizes.

But I digress.

This morning, I ran across this BuzzFeed list of 18 Holier-Than-Thou Tea Bags That Need To Mind Their Own Business. Here’s my (least) favorite:

I don’t really know what that means. And I don’t really know what it’s trying to suggest – is it bad to feel? I got the distinct impression that social norms would generally say otherwise.

But I don’t really want to debate the merits of what’s printed on a tea bag. What I really want to know is, why is a tea bag trying to tell me what to do with my life?

I’ve wondered this for awhile, actually. I drink a lot of tea, and increasing I’ve noticed tea bags coming with a cryptic little statement hinting at optimism and greater understanding of the universe.

And this phenomenon is surely not solely seen in tea. Everywhere I look are little signs of hope, strength and understanding. Or at least signs that purport to be about those things.

I find myself staring, thinking, trying to understand these sign. Just what do they mean? Are they really advocating for that as the sole way to approach life? Do they realize that as a statement it could be read with a really horrible implication? Is the author so definitive about the statement, that even presented with this worse-case scenario, they’d continue to back their play?

When I was younger, I distinctly remember my sister invoking Darwinian logic while laying into someone wearing a No Fear shirt.

“Fear can be a good thing,” she argued, “I mean…if a predator comes to eat you, you probably want to run.”

That’s not to take away from the valuable of bravery, but the world isn’t nearly so crisply black and white. You can’t simply put “bravery” in a good box and “fear” in a bad. Everything has its time an place.

So as I read these cryptic notes which try, perhaps, to spread “good” feelings, all I can think is really? Is that really good all the time? Really the be all and end all? Is that all there is to it?

Keep your niceties. I don’t think so.

With Valentine’s Day approaching (a topic for another post), February is always a good time to show your local love. Somerville Local First, on whose board I serve, makes shopping local a community affair with their quarterly Local is for Lovers markets.

So stop by Arts at the Armory from 10am-3pm on Sunday, February 9 to see some great local vendors!

This is also a great chance to pick up your 2014 YUM: A Taste of Immigrant City card.

The YUM card benefits The Welcome Project, whose board I also serve on, and supports adult English classes and leadership programs for youth and adults. The $10 card provides a 10% discount on food orders above $25 at nine participating immigrant-owned restaurants.

Shopping local means supporting your community. It means supporting the fun and funky, the mom and pop, and the unique and diverse.

Hope to see you there!