A Circular Path

Canada’s birthday starts with getting off at Union Station, then taking the trip to the Distillery District by foot. The day is muggy and with a bit of rain. Judy and I walk through Mill Street, then north toward Queen Street. We stop for a treat of juice and frozen yogurt, followed by the trek down Leslie Street. We finally head south to Woodbine Park, where we see a concert by a band that does reggae covers, mostly of songs by Bob Marley. We head down to Ashbridges Bay Park, and walk along Cherry Street.  Needless to say, exhaustion sets in for both of us. By the time a bus arrives, we don’t even bother to ask where the bus takes us. We are only happy to be able to sit down for a while and enjoy the circular path of the bus, as it winds through Lakeshore followed by Cherry Beach, and then finally toward Union Station again. But we really had no clue where the bus was going after all.

There is something beautiful and loving about a path that goes around in a circle...and yet, how frightening it can be as well. The feeling of being in a circular pattern sometimes jolts and sometimes leads me to keep trying to crack the code of the pattern so that I am off and running again. It seems that psychology is obsessed with this idea of ‘breaking the circle’, and making sure that a particular counter-productive pattern is not engaged in again. Can circles sometimes be meaningful in themselves? I think about how being on a bus just offered a good respite from the pains of a long walk. And being able to go in a circle seemed to soothe me for a while and give me the energy to keep going after the long hike.

Irving Singer wrote a beautiful series of books, The Nature of Love. In the second volume, he talks about the courtly love that occurs in the medieval periods of Europe, particularly arising in Italy and France in the 1100s. In one of the courtly dialogues, he describes a lover who tries to convince a lady to love him using philosophical arguments, of all things. The dialogue becomes a circle which dances around notions such as why we love, who is worthy of love, and what earns the respect of another person. I think that a lot of what counts as courtly love perhaps doesn’t hold true today. For example, the idea that a woman should somehow ‘reward’ a man for his virtue through loving him seems quite absurd and oppressive. I don’t think that raising a person to the status of a god or goddess has also done very much good in the area of relationships. But I think the value of studying these dialogues is in knowing what does break down in the way people think.

Incoherence has a lot of valuable insight in itself. It might even be useful to study it so that it doesn’t happen so often in relationships. But there is something else that is valuable about studying these kinds of circular movements of discourse and dialogue. I think the polarities that dialogues introduce (albeit philosophical) soften the sense that there ever is a completely right or wrong direction to take. Dialogue allows people to step back and even laugh a bit at their sense of certainty. And the philosophic dialogue is often the one that people are reluctant to engage with others, so reading one offers a vicarious way of experiencing the nuances of the beliefs that people cherish. While dialogues often don’t arrive at conclusions, their circularity can have a rich source of value for the person who is willing to take that journey.

I don’t think that I can necessarily apply the knowledge of an historical philosophy of medieval love to modern context. In fact, I do believe that the way people understand love has changed with the times.  However, I think that it is sometimes useful to trace the circular paths of history even if it doesn’t seem to pertain to today’s world. At the very least, learning about a different way of thinking can help me to be less attached to my ‘certainty’ that the current thinking is the ‘best’. And it also gives me clues as to how my present views evolved and to what extent they are based on the cause and conditions of the moment. As I explore other notions of what love is, I become more understanding and tolerant of the different perspectives that arise from this complex subject.  I can be gentler and forgiving if I learn to explore the kinds of inroads that others have taken, including the strengths and limitations of certain ways of thinking.  But the key is not to treat this exploration as though I were trying to replace old certainties with new ones. It is rather to soften the heart by making me less certain of what I think I know. This is already a good step toward compassion, in my opinion.