CIRCLES

Yesterday ended with a word.

Circles.

And as I wrote in 704, there wasn’t some grand moment where that word appeared and suddenly Chapter 02 existed.

It was considerably messier than that.

CIRCLES itself actually existed before the Chapter did. Parts of it had been sitting around for a while, unfinished, as one of those ideas that I liked enough not to throw away but apparently not enough to know what to do with either.

At the time it was just a song. Or at least I thought it was. Then BLAME happened.

We started talking about patterns. About the things we repeat even when we know where they lead. About the things passed from one person to another, sometimes without anyone ever deciding to pass them on. And suddenly I started seeing the same idea everywhere.

Not just in the darker things either. That became important. Because circles are not automatically something that needs to be broken.

Some should be. Some absolutely fucking should be.

But others are the reason we become who we are.

Things our parents gave us that we carry into our own families. Traditions that survive because they mean something. Lessons learned by one person and passed to another. Friends finding their way back to each other after years apart.

The same shape can describe completely different things. And that fascinated me. I think that is when CIRCLES stopped being just the name of a song.

It became a way of looking at the others.

TRUST is a circle I spent years trying to get out of.

TIME is almost the opposite. Something my father gave me that I hope I can pass on to my own children.

BLAME is what happens when we stand inside a pattern while convincing ourselves that somebody else built it.

Different stories. Different people. Different consequences.

But somehow we kept ending up back at the same shape.

A Circle.

There was another part of it too. Perspective.

You can walk the exact same road twice and it won’t necessarily be the same road. Not because the road changed.

Because you did.

Something that felt like the end of the world when you were twenty can look completely different twenty years later. Something you barely noticed when it happened can become one of the things that shaped you the most. And sometimes you don’t understand the circle until you have travelled far enough around it to see where you started.

That idea ended up becoming just as important to Chapter 02 as repetition itself. Because seeing a pattern and understanding one are not always the same thing. And we are incredibly good at recognising circles in other people.

Families repeating the same mistakes. Countries repeating history. People staying in relationships or friendships they know are destroying them. Entire societies complaining about behaviours we all participate in.

It gets considerably harder when the circle is our own. Maybe that is why we look for blame first. It is easier