Going in Circles

Stuck like our planet at the start of the year.

The heart of the Chicago transit system is a couple of miles of elevated track known as the Loop. Aptly named, the Loop circles downtown so that if you’re on the Brown Line and don’t remember to get off, as may or may not have happened to me last week, it will put you right back where you started.

We’re back at the start of another calendar year, the start of another orbit around the sun. New year’s day is a time that is supposed to refresh, a time of resolution, of motion, of looking ahead. But this new year, I just feel stuck. Like no matter what I did, the earth is still right back where it started, and no matter what I do, it will be back there again.

A consequence of the Loop design is that trains end up waiting for others to enter and exit the loop on their way into and out of downtown. There’s nothing more frustrating than when you’re running short on time and the train comes to a standstill on the tracks. “Attention passengers we’ll be standing momentarily.” I mean it’s expected, something you can’t control, usually not a big deal. But recently, man, I don’t know what got me. Here I was, late, as usual, and once again on a train “standing momentarily, waiting for signal clearance.” Maybe it’s just that standing momentarily is exactly how I’ve felt these last weeks, or is it months, or years? Maybe it’s the way a calendar reset has reminded me of my lack of momentum, how little I’ve moved since the beginning of last year? Maybe I’m feeling the squeeze of a new year, the pressing sense of time evaporating away?

It’s been two years now since I’ve started my substack blog online. Two years of grinding out words in public. I was looking back through some of my writing from then, and found an unpublished journal entry, dated 24 January, 2023. Guess how it started? “Your attention please, we’re standing momentarily, waiting for signal clearance.” Not much has changed. Indeed, that entry recounted my experience ice skating that day. “There’s all these people just going around in circles,” I’d written. “Around and around and around.”

Like everything, it feels like, on this planet Earth.

I mean, I know that technically the earth doesn’t return to *exactly* the same spot each year. Elliptical orbits like ours slowly shift, or “precess” their direction of greatest elongation, which means our exact distance from the sun after each orbit might put us just a little closer or further away; said again, due to our apsidal precession we’ve budged over a little less than an earth diameter from where we were this time last year.

Which I guess should give some hope - even our orbiting planet doesn’t always end up exactly back where it started. But man does it move slow. This precession takes 112,000 years to complete a cycle, and I don’t have that kind of time.

I once heard a blues musician, performing on his 80th birthday at a club he’d played since he was 22, quip between songs that “birthdays scare me.” I start to understand what he means.

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When adults talked of the daily grind, or the weight of the old millstone, I always thought of it as some sort of friction, a resistance like tectonic plates, scraping against motion. Or like a murky swamp in which you take one squelching step after another. In other words, I thought of the old millstone as a weight that slowed you down, yes, but one under which you could still plod forward.

But have you seen a millstone at work? I once saw a person working a millstone, pouring the grain into the center, and then turning it in circles, around and around, like stirring a stone soup. I wonder now if it’s the circling as much as the weight that grinds you down. Millstones grind in place, no motion on your part required.

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When I’m feeling overwhelmed by the grind of a work day, I still often take the L around the loop from my office to Millennium Park to strap on my ice skates. This day, as I watched the other skaters go around the rink, I’m struck less by the endless circling of it all, and much more the intricate weaving dance that seems to be continuously taking place – skaters gliding in and out, front and back, between and around. The best skaters make their motions look effortless –streaks of beauty – and even those wobbling along clutching the wall provide a punctuating relief to the scene, an image of determination, and progress.

Laced up and soaring – feeling far more lifted than the 2 inches above the ice my blades provide – I remembered something else. While earth orbits the sun, it’s path through space is actually quite dynamic, never crossing the same spot twice. The sun, I remembered, is also soaring through the galaxy, pulling its planets along at a breathtaking speed. Despite how we draw them, planetary orbits are not flat two dimensional circles, but are instead long twisting spirals, great twisting helixes rising through the night. Through no effort of its own, the earth swings in a cosmic ballet: not stagnant nor stuck, but, in the best sense, free.

And I realize now, dancing seems to not just revel in circles, but require it: pirouettes, partner swings, grand jetés returning, arms extended, to center stage. Through my connections to folk music I’ve attended a few contra dances. In contra, pairs of dancers form long lines from the stage to the end of the hall, and then as banjo and fiddle play, couples progress up and down the lines, dancing with each other pair of dancers. The thing about a contra dance is that you almost always end up back where you started – but now your cheeks are flushed and your heart is pumping and you’ve touched hands with many others on the way.

And so, on the precipice of this new year, I revisit our planetary dance. This endless going in circles, the great wheeling weight of history and time. And I picture it now like a great soaring eagle, riding a rushing air current above an inland lake, spiraling up and up and up, circling in the joy of flight. Sometimes, I realize, circling is the only way to fly.