Albert Camus came into the world over a century ago, and somehow his words feel like they were written for the morning news.
Camus spent much of his life wrestling with a question most people try to avoid: What do you do when the world doesn’t make sense?
He lived through war, political turmoil, violence, and uncertainty. He looked around and saw a world that could be unfair, irrational, and sometimes downright cruel. Yet he refused to surrender to despair. Instead, he argued that meaning isn’t something we find lying around waiting for us. It’s something we create.
One of his most famous ideas came from the myth of Sisyphus, the poor soul condemned to push a boulder up a hill for eternity, only to watch it roll back down again. Camus looked at that story and saw something most people missed. He saw dignity in the struggle itself.
That’s a lesson worth remembering.
Most of us aren’t pushing a rock up a hill, but we’ve all carried our own version of it. Health problems. Lost loves. Empty bank accounts. Dreams that didn’t work out the way we planned. We get knocked down, pick ourselves up, and keep moving.
Camus understood that.
There’s a harbor wisdom in that idea. The sea doesn’t care about your plans. The wind changes. Storms arrive uninvited. Some days you make good time. Some days you’re just trying to keep the boat upright. Either way, you cast off the lines and head out again the next morning.
That’s not optimism.
That’s courage.
On the anniversary of Albert Camus’s birth, maybe that’s the lesson worth carrying with us. Life doesn’t owe us explanations. The world isn’t required to make sense.
But we can still write the poem.
We can still tell the story.
We can still love, laugh, create, and keep pushing the rock.
And some days, that’s more than enough.
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.”
Not a bad thought to carry through the fog.
— Dan Sanders, Rambling Harbor
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