Latest news with #Sisyphus
Irish Examiner
22-07-2025
- Sport
- Irish Examiner
A little voice in my head kept saying: 'Tipp on a run are like a stampede of raging bulls'
Greek legend has it that Sisyphus is cursed to forever spend each day rolling a boulder to the top of a hill, only for it to immediately roll back down. He has to start that arduous step-by-step push up the hill again the next day. And so it goes for Cork hurlers. In 2006, Kilkenny were famously waiting in the long grass. The prophet JBM guided us back to Croke Park in 2013. Not a great day at the office, but somehow we were ahead and time up, well almost up. Domhnall O'Donovan, the least likely man to score, gets an impossible point at the death. This is exclusive subscriber content. Already a subscriber? Sign in Take us with you this summer. Annual €130€65 Best value Monthly €12€6 / month
Indian Express
03-07-2025
- Health
- Indian Express
We can never be free of suffering. But we can choose how we suffer
'Why me?' This question rises unbidden in times of crisis. It may arrive in a hospital ward, in the stillness after a diagnosis, or at the bedside of a loved one. It is the human soul's most honest protest when life turns suddenly unjust, cruel, meaningless. As a retired psychiatrist and a husband watching his beloved wife of 52 years suffer the indignities of advanced Parkinson's Disease, I know this question well. It is not a theoretical query, but one shaped by breath, loss, and long nights. Albert Camus wrote that the only serious philosophical question is whether life is worth living. He gave us the haunting image of Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder up a hill only for it to roll back down. Yet, Camus invites us to imagine Sisyphus happy. Not because his task has changed, but because his mind has. He has accepted the absurd and still chosen to live. We are not always given reasons for what happens. Often, we are left with the bare reality, and our response becomes the only form of dignity we possess. In that sense, 'Why me?' is not just a cry of anguish but a plea for meaning. It is an invitation to examine what lies at the core of our existence. Psychologically, the question arises when we are brought face to face with our limits. When illness strikes, or a career ends abruptly, or grief overwhelms us, our internal compass spins. The story we told ourselves about our life no longer holds. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived Auschwitz, believed that human beings could endure unimaginable suffering as long as they had a 'why', a purpose. 'When we are no longer able to change a situation,' he wrote, 'we are challenged to change ourselves'. This has been true in my life. My wife's decline has changed everything. There are no holidays now, no spontaneous walks, no ordinary ease. Yet, every morning, as we begin the rituals of care, feeding, physiotherapy, soft music, gentle words, I realise that love remains. And in love, there is still meaning. Caregiving brings its own burden, a quieter suffering. It is a slow, private erosion of one's energy and identity. But it also deepens character. What begins as duty slowly becomes devotion. The question 'Why me?' may persist, but the answer becomes less important than the daily act of showing up. For people of faith, 'Why me?' becomes a prayer. The psalmist cried, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' These same words were echoed by Christ on the cross. Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is part of it. In Hinduism and Buddhism, suffering is accepted as part of the human condition, dukkha, something to be transcended through awareness, detachment, compassion. In Islam, the concept of sabr, or patient endurance, teaches that the divine is closest to the broken-hearted. Sometimes, faith does not remove the suffering — it simply holds it. It gives us a wider frame in which to place our pain. One need not understand suffering to bear it with grace. Biologically speaking, suffering protects us — pain alerts us to danger. Anguish compels us to seek others. The cry of 'why me?' has evolutionary value; it invites others to come close, to witness, to help. But beyond biology, there is empathy. When we suffer, we become more capable of understanding others who suffer. If we let it, pain can open the heart. That may be one of the few hidden blessings of suffering: It deepens us. Over time, 'Why me?' may shift to 'What now?' or 'How shall I live through this?' That shift is subtle but powerful. It marks a move from protest to purpose. From paralysis to action. Not all questions need answers. Some simply need listening. As theologian Paul Tillich said, 'The first duty of love is to listen.' So, we listen to ourselves, to those we love, and to the silence where no words come. In my home, amid medicines, wheelchairs, nurses, there is still laughter. There is music. There is prayer. No one escapes suffering. But we can choose how we suffer. In that choice lies our freedom. The writer is a retired psychiatrist
Epoch Times
01-07-2025
- Science
- Epoch Times
Let's Heed the Lesson of Sisyphus
One of the great things about the Greek myths is their ability to explain human psychology and reveal more than the merely superficial. As psychologist James Hillman wryly observed, 'Mythology is a psychology of antiquity. Psychology is a mythology of modernity.' Take the case of Sisyphus. He was a mortal, and his name (spelled, Sesephus, according to English critic Robert Graves) means 'very wise.' His father was Aeolus, king of Thessaly and keeper of the winds, though, in later traditions, Aeolus became associated with being the god of the winds. Sisyphus was mortal. Nevertheless, as with many Greek heroes (and a villain, in this case), he was brushed with some divine connection.
Observer
21-06-2025
- Health
- Observer
This is easy to solve
Middle East peace, climate change, Ukraine — if Sisyphus were assigned one of today's global problems, he'd plead to be returned to rock rolling. So let's focus for a moment on a global challenge that we can actually solve: starvation. I suspect that some Americans — perhaps including President Donald Trump — want to slash humanitarian aid because they think problems like starvation are intractable. Absolutely wrong! We have nifty, elegant and cheap solutions to global hunger. Consider something really simple: deworming. I'm travelling through West Africa on my annual win-a-trip journey, in which I take a university student along on a reporting trip and every day we see children plagued by worms that aggravate their malnutrition. Nutrients go to their parasites, not to them. While worms are worthy antagonists — a female worm can lay 200,000 eggs in a day — aid agencies can deworm a child for less than $1 a year. This makes them stronger, less anemic and more likely to attend school. Researchers have even found higher lifetime earnings. In the US, we spend considerable sums deworming pets; every year I spend $170 deworming my dog, Connie Kuvasz Kristof. Yet deworming the world's children has never been as high a priority as deworming pets in the West, so we tolerate a situation in which 1 billion children worldwide carry worms. My win-a-trip winner, Sofia Barnett of Brown University and I are reminded in every village we visit of the toll of hunger. Malnutrition leaves more than one-fifth of children worldwide stunted, countless millions cognitively impaired and vast numbers (especially menstruating women and girls) weak from anemia. Malnutrition is a factor in 45 per cent of child deaths worldwide. A health worker weighs a baby at a clinic in Bombali District, Sierra Leone. NYT file photo Yet we also see how these deaths can be inexpensively prevented. In one Sierra Leone clinic, we met a 13-month-old boy, Abukamara, with sores and stick limbs from severe malnutrition. His mother, Mariatu Fornah, invited us to her village deep in the bush. The family is impoverished and struggling. The parents and four children share a mattress in a thatch-roof mud-brick hut with no electricity, and no one in the family had eaten that day, even though it was early afternoon. Fornah is doing what she can. She spent her entire savings of $3 and traded away a dress to get a traditional herb remedy for Abukamara, and she made the long trek to the clinic to get help. And there she found it — in the form of a miracle peanut paste. The clinic gave her a supply of the peanut paste, one foil packet a day and it will almost certainly restore Abukamara. This peanut paste contains protein, micronutrients and everything a child's body needs, plus it tastes good and costs just $1 per child per day. Known by the brand name Plumpy'Nut or the ungainly abbreviation RUTF, for ready-to-use therapeutic food, it has saved millions of children's lives over the years. Trump's closure of the United States Agency for International Development led to the cancellation of orders for RUTF and 185,535 boxes of it are piled up in the warehouse of Edesia Nutrition, according to the firm's founder and CEO, There are other inexpensive nutritional steps that could save many lives and some are astonishingly low-tech. Optimal breastfeeding could save up to 800,000 lives a year, The Lancet estimated, with no need for trucks, warehouses or refrigeration. Vitamin A supplementation would save lives, as would food fortification (adding nutrients to common foods). Promoting orange-flesh sweet potatoes over white-flesh ones would help, because orange ones have a precursor of vitamin A. Encouraging healthier crops like beans and millet rich with iron, rather than, say, cassava would help as well. Investments in nutrition — along with others in vaccines and in treating diarrhea, pneumonia and other ailments — help explain why fewer than half as many children die before the age of 5 now as in 2000. Yet after leading the world in fighting malnutrition, the US may be surrendering the field. America used to be the world's leading backer of nutrition, but the US government did not even send a formal delegation to the 2025 Nutrition for Growth summit, a conference held every four years. The US was expected to host the next summit, but now that's not clear. In my journalistic career, I've seen children dying from bullets, malaria, cholera and simple diarrhea, but perhaps the hardest to watch are kids who are starving. Their bodies have sores that don't heal, their hair falls out and their skin peels. By that point, even nourishing food doesn't always bring them back. What is most eerie is that such children don't cry or protest; they are impassive, with blank faces. That's because the body is fighting to keep the organs functioning and refuses to waste energy on tears or protests. Their heads don't move, but their eyes follow us silently, presumably wondering if we will care enough to ease their pain. Mr. Trump, will we? — The New York Times
The 42
16-06-2025
- Sport
- The 42
McIlroy clearly isn't ready for his next Everest - but can he keep going without one forever?
SO IT TURNS out Sisyphus might have quite liked the rock all along? The rock, after all, gave him an identity and a purpose. Without it, he's just a guy walking up a hill. Where's the story in that? After Rory McIlroy finally rolled his pock-marked rock over the hill at Augusta National, the consensus was that he was now freed of all pressure and burden and would now go on a tear through the majors. This wasn't just the verdict of over-excited sportswriters like your correspondent here: McIlroy himself said he was playing with house money for the rest of his career. When McIlroy began his press conference on Masters Sunday by asking, 'What are we going to talk about next year?', he should have known that the answer would quickly be, 'Er, it'll still be you, Rory.' McIlroy cannot help but take the path of most interest, and so his post-Masters story has been more captivating than anyone might have expected. His form on the course has certainly slumped. A brilliant 67 at Oakmont yesterday sealed a tied-19th finish that looks a lot better than it felt, while he missed the cut at the Canadian Open with one of the worst rounds of his career and was a non-factor on favoured terrain at the PGA Championship. The vibes, meanwhile, have jackknifed. McIlroy has not always looked as agitated and dispirited on the course as he did at times at Oakmont – the course was so difficult that he was far from alone in tossing clubs – and he has remained as polite and decent with course volunteers and staff members as ever. McIlroy has, however, cut a jaded kind of melancholy with the media, declining all four post-round interview requests during the PGA Championship and maintaining his silence after his first two rounds at the US Open. This is not to say it's been a total blackout – McIlroy has given pre-tournament press conferences at each of his last three events and spoke after his two rounds in Canada – but that the game's biggest star won't speak after the biggest events is a needless failing of already put-upon fans. This has also provoked a disproportionate level of kickback among some in the American golf media, with some hitherto near-sycophantic journalists and podcasters caustic in their criticism of McIlroy's gradual public withdrawal. Given McIlroy occasionally fills his travel time with these podcasts, it would be unsurprising if he was stung by the reaction. All of this feels like part of a bigger split between McIlroy and America itself, as he plans a move to London while trimming his PGA Tour schedule and committing to play in India and Australia later this year. McIlroy, however, would have been better advised skipping media after his round on Saturday rather than deliver the dyspeptic, humourless four-odd minutes he did. He gave Stephen Watson of BBC Northern Ireland a two-word answer to his softball opening question, and went on to voice vague frustrations at the media in general, undermine his admirable grind in making Friday's cut by saying he didn't particularly want to play the weekend at all, and then rounded it all out by saying he felt he had earned the right to do whatever he wanted. Advertisement The media should not be the chiefly offended by these abject minutes, Rory McIlroy should. He has rarely delivered public comments less representative of himself. McIlroy was happily more like his old self on Sunday, giving a cheery pre-round interview to NBC before shooting the joint-lowest score of the day and giving a much wordier, thoughtful post-round interview. 'Look, I climbed my Everest in April, and I think after you do something like that, you've got to make your way back down, and you've got to look for another mountain to climb', said McIlroy, admitting his mental focus and motivation has been absent since the Masters. This was the first US Open in which he finished outside the top 10 since a missed cut in 2018, after which he sat down with himself and resolved to build his game and frame his mind around the year's biggest tests. This built the consistency that ultimately set himself back down the path to Masters glory. Having prepared himself to win, the second major part of the breakthrough was his decision to be willing to lose. The 2022 Open, the 2023 and 2024 US Opens and the 'nearly man' run in autumn last year provided enough heartbreak for anyone's career, but also showed that McIlroy had, in how own words, learned to be 'vulnerable.' After all, anybody who wins big must first be ready to lose big. A crucial part of this vulnerability was his openness with the media: asked to explain away the latest gut-wrench and near-miss or preview the next weighty major title, McIlroy was hopeless at batting away a question and muttering some bromide about 'the process.' Instead he engaged with an open heart and an open mind. Hence why it feels we all got the payoff at the Masters in April. But all of that is, frankly, exhausting, so who can blame him if he just wanted to rock up to a few majors and treat them just as golf tournaments for a while, rather than grand exhibits of his ambition, status and legacy? He has been doing his best to avoid stumbling onto another grand quest since the Masters, and his media withdrawal is potentially part of all of this, given we keep asking him about precisely that which he is trying to avoid. We asked him, for instance, ahead of the PGA Championship whether he has found another career North Star after completing the career Grand Slam, to which he replied he hadn't and nor was he seeking one. 'I think everyone saw how hard having a north star is and being able to get over the line', he said, adding he had 'burdened' himself with the Grand Slam chase. He's had to answer several of these media contrivances. But therein lies the rub. Can McIlroy continue to compete at the very elite end of a maddening and volatile sport without another north star? Is the necessary price of more ambition the weight of another burden? And does he have the appetite to carry another? Searching for that focus, McIlroy has trained his sights on the Open championship in Portrush next month. 'If I can't get motivated to get up for an Open Championship at home, then I don't know what can motivate me', asked McIlroy after yesterday's final round. That does not read as a rhetorical question, but an open one, and another question he must decide whether he wants to answer.
