The Burden of Lightness

My friend just sighed “how empty life can be”. Same day earlier the other friend of mine complained “my burden is so heavy”. Light or heavy? Good or bad? I don’t know. But the exact same question reminds me of this excerpt from Kundera’s “The Unbearable Lightness of Being”.

If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.

But is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?

The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, 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. The heaviest of burdens is therefore simultaneously an image of life's most intense fulfillment. The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become.

Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.

What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness?

Ah my friends, never an easy choice isn’t it? But like other things in life, is there any?

***