Moving in Circles
She moved in circles around the ice as I sketched the outline of her path in my composition book. I’d come outside for inspiration, feeling that my office didn’t allow enough space for my thoughts to breathe. But instead of words, all I found were lazy circles reverberating one off another for pages and pages. The skater was just a girl but she carried herself with the ease of someone much older. Perhaps such grace only accompanied her on the rink and her childlike tendencies returned once the blades left her feet. There is an ease in circles afterall; in the rise and fall, in the continuation and momentum. I could leave my blue pen, cap nibbled to a point, pressed firmly on the page for the entirety of the movement. Without much more than a turn of my index finger and the support of my thumb I could make a symbol unbroken. Yet, no matter how I tried, I could not draw the same circle twice. I could not replicate the precision nor repeat its simplicity. Maybe that’s why water ripples. We can only create echoes of what has come before, not duplicates. I don’t know why it bothered me so much that this young girl could glide effortlessly on frozen water and I could not capture its likeness through pen and ink.
I’d walked circles before, in the form of a labyrinth carved into the land. The aim is to reach the center but the path purposefully leads you away from it.
When I walked the labyrinth it was a gray winter day much like the one at the rink. There were others also physically moving through the metaphor. Our entrances were staggered and I brought up the rear. We all walked at our own pace and passed near one another, never crossing, as we made our way towards the center. One by one each person found stillness in the middle of the elaborate circle as the path somehow pushed me towards the farthest edges of the labyrinth. I fought back the illogical doubt that I’d somehow taken a wrong turn. Unknowingly, the point at which I felt farthest from the goal I was just mere steps away from it. Only by walking through the uncertainty did I eventually meet my peers in the innermost sanctum.
When it was time to exit the labyrinth I was at the front of the procession. At once the uncertainty of following was replaced with the fear of leading. As I wound back through the field, following the curves of the land, my fellow walkers fanned out beside me, moving closer and farther across the expanse. We all walked the same path and reached the exit in our own time.
The ice skaters’ mother called to her from the warmth of the viewing balcony. It was time to go. The little girl did not stop in response, her path did not falter, instead she completed the loop as she’d done a hundred times before. I turned to a fresh page in my notebook. Without lifting the pen I drew two sidelong circles intersecting through the center.
Great, another metahpor, I mumbled to myself. Then I stood and placed one foot in front of the other as I turned to walk home.
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