During my Sunday morning walk, one of my favorite Creedence Clearwater Revival songs came on my Pandora station. The song is Up Around the Bend, and there is a point in the song where the lyrics state, "You can ponder perpetual motion, Fix your mind on a crystal day, Always time for a good conversation, There's an ear for what you say." As I listened to those lyrics, I found myself thinking of Sisyphus. For some, the only exposure they have ever had to Sisyphus is from watching a Red Bull commercial in the early 2000's. For me, I learned about him at a young age because I was fascinated with Greek mythology. As king of Corinth, Sisyphus was known for his chicanery and cheating death and ultimately being condemned to Hades with an eternal punishment of forever rolling a boulder up a hill. Leave it to Creedance and their singing about perpetual motion to make me take a cosmic leap to Sisyphus and Greek mythology, but hey, that's what happens to me when I'm walking and I'm thinking about my next #OwnYourEpic blog and how it relates to education during a pandemic. For the sake of making a point, forget the back story on Sisyphus that led to his punishment and focus instead on the task that he has been condemned to perform for all eternity in hell. It is this task of rolling a boulder up a hill for eternity that is relevant to the lesson that I have learned from Sisyphus.
If I'm being honest with myself, I have always taken on the mindset that if I want something done, I should do it myself because I can be certain it will turn out the way that I want it to turn out. When things are successful, I give the success to others and when things fail, I take ownership of the failure because I was the one responsible. For me, this mindset embodies the arduous Sisyphean task of rolling the boulder up the hill. I'm alone, struggling to do the work that sometimes feels pointless, fruitless, and unrewarding. As a leader, however, I have learned that it is not possible to sustain this mindset because it is exhausting and it undervalues the people that you lead who are fully capable of taking on some of the load and providing the needed assist that you need to get the job done. They may go about completing the task in a different way than you would have done it, but it gets completed nonetheless and done well.
In education, we all have a little Sisyphus in us no matter what role we serve in schools. As dedicated servants to our students and our communities, we tell ourselves that we need to do certain things by ourselves because only we can do them the way they should be done. We struggle and exert so much energy to help our students find success the best way we know how not realizing that if we just took our blinders off for one second, we might see that our colleagues are struggling with the exact same boulder of an issue that we are and if we would collectively put our efforts together, we could lighten the load and actually get that boulder to the summit of the hill.
I've always subscribed to the belief that we should never throw away a good crisis because it is an opportunity to reevaluate how we do things and get better. The crisis right now is COVID-19 and it is throwing us all for a loop in education. We are all struggling with our mental health, anxiety, stress, and fear. These are the boulders that we are trying to push up a hill and we are getting increasingly exhausted and run the risk of being bowled over and trying to escape it much like Indiana Jones did in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The reality is that we can make a choice to set aside our preconceived notions that we have to do things on our own and come together as a team of educators and push our collective boulder up a hill together. This is really the only way that we are going to get through this pandemic and when we do, we are going to be better because of it. Use whatever cliche you like: teamwork makes the dream work, we're all in this together, or Red Bull gives you wings. Learn from Sisyphus and know that you do not have to struggle in isolation. We will reach the summit together and when we do, we can roll that boulder down the hill and put on the best mask burning bonfire the world has seen and celebrate together.
#OwnYourEpic #ONWARD
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