"You have to imagine Sisyphus happy", it is with these words that Camus ends his essay on the myth of the same name.
Unequivocally we are all cybermodern Sisyphus caught in the frantic rhythms of busyness, in those of hyperactivity;
stuck in a representation of time which, reduced to instantaneism, does not leave us a second to breathe.
Read alsoCharlotte Casiraghi: "What attaches me to philosophy is that it never strays from the campfire around which we deploy our lives"
Too much accumulation
And we run, always further, always faster.
We run without restraint, without knowing what we are running after.
We try to catch up with time, life that is fleeing, the remnant of hope that keeps us straight.
We run but loaded with all the burdens of everyday life: don't forget to put the sunscreen in the suitcase of the little one who is going to camp, call back this client before 10 am, finish closing this file... Damn!
I haven't done the shopping for tonight.
We run faster, further, again, constantly overtaken by injunctions of expected success or perfection.
And all those emails left unanswered that we can't get rid of.
Emptying doesn't mean thinking about nothing
Elsa Godard
We accumulate too many things, too many objects, too many thoughts... The agitation is such that it causes dispersion and bewilderment.
No wonder in these conditions that the risk of falling or collapsing looms.
Depression is also a void that takes the place of life.
However, before the void seizes us, wouldn't it be in our interest, voluntarily, to
create the void
as a necessary valve, a mental and physical discharge, a deposit of everything that weighs us down?
Clearing one's head, like a voluntary abandonment to life and joy, an authorization to forget, a setting in parentheses which would also be a necessary and cozy retreat in oneself, for oneself.
To empty does not mean to
think of nothing,
but no longer thinking out of obligation, with pain, no longer carrying, for the time of a saving
parenthesis
, all the responsibilities of material life.
Emptiness is then understood as a
purification
and as
obviously
empty of all that is not essential to us.
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Elsa Godart Press Service
A true regeneration
However, “the word
empty
, taking its meaning from the word
empty,
corresponds to a positive action”, affirms Bachelard, commenting on Bergson.
In this sense,
Emptying
is leaving a place to fill yourself differently, with essentiality, simplicity, truth.
We “must” (without injunction!) therefore make a last effort, formulate a desire to become a fervent follower of voluntary oblivion.
And thus plunge, far from personal development, into this
void that empties
, head, spirit, body, and which in this sense is comparable to true wisdom.
Moreover, Christian mysticism or Asian Taoism also have recourse to the culture of emptiness, as true regeneration.
Here is a practice to put in place during the holidays, but also to continue throughout the year... if we want to continue to be happy Sisyphians.
Incentives to...
See:
the “Rothko / Monet” exhibition at Giverny, for a radical dive into color, on the double flying carpet of two painting geniuses.
Read:
The Empty and the Full
, by the traveler Nicolas Bouvier on a trip to Japan between 1964 and 1970.
Last book published:
Ending social guilt
to finally be free
, Ed.
Albin Michel, 2021.
Organized until Sunday June 12 by
the Monaco Philosophical Meetings
, under the chairmanship of Charlotte Casiraghi, co-founder.
Free and open to all.
On the program, ecology, education, care, women, and the pleasure of philosophizing.
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