Note to Self: In Praise of Burdens and Beauty by Mistake
There’s a statue of Atlas bearing the weight of the world at the center of Plaza Humboldt in La Paz (the city I grew up in). Occasionally, my family and I would sit on a park bench to feed the hoard of pigeons. The birds would indifferently peck away at the crumbs, then fly away to relieve themselves on Atlas’ dignified hunch. To them, the weight of the world is a great spot to take a shit on.
I’m reading Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, in which he contemplates the nature of the burdens we carry.
“The heaviest of burdens crushes us”, he says, “It pins us to the ground. But in the love poetry of every age, the woman longs to be weighed down by the man’s body.” Conversely, “the absence of a burden causes one to become lighter than air, to soar into the heights, to take leave of the earth and become only half real.”
Our social fabric depends on our willingness to latch burdens to our bodies like lapel pins — the business we built from the ground up, the children we raised, the hours we worked, and the money we saved. We put them in our pockets like pebbles. Without them, we risk floating off into the ether with the rest of the pigeons.
Is the heaviness of burdens truly deplorable, and is lightness as splendid as we think?
