Awakening to love can happen only as we let go of our obsession with power and domination.
— bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (2000)
bell hooks opens her chapter on values with the claim that a love ethic is incompatible with the appetite for control. The two can’t share a life. Where one is, the other isn’t. The thing that makes the appetite hard to give up is that it feels like agency, like getting somewhere. The thing that makes the love ethic hard to begin is that it doesn’t feel like progress in the same way. It feels like slowing down, while everyone else, including me, is still trying to win.
The day before yesterday, I went for a long walk. I can’t honestly explain why that day and not the one before. Three hours. River on the right going out, river on the left coming back. I didn’t take headphones. I didn’t take a list of things to think about. I just walked.
It’s hard to explain how much of a small heresy that was. The voice that’s run my life for decades is the voice of getting things done, of optimizing, of using every hour for some advance toward something. Three hours of walking with no agenda was, by that voice’s metrics, three hours wasted. By another metric, including hooks’, it was the first thing in a while not built on the assumption that my time has to earn its keep.
A love ethic isn’t a feeling. hooks is clear about this throughout the book. It’s a way of arranging the day, of asking different questions about what matters. She names six. Care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, knowledge. None are dramatic. Most look like nothing from the outside.
A long walk can be one of them. Care for the body without asking the body to perform. Commitment to a routine that won’t pay off in any visible way. Trust that something is happening even when nothing seems to be. Responsibility for the day, instead of handing it off to whatever wants me. Respect for the slowness things actually require. Knowledge by attention, which is the only kind that lasts. Six of hooks’ values, hidden in one slow practice, with no one watching.
The other thing that happens on a long walk is that the obsession with power, which I’d been carrying around for decades without naming it, has nothing to grab onto. There’s nothing to win on a long walk. No one to outmaneuver. The body sets the pace. The river chose the route a long time before I got here. For three hours, I’m not in charge of anything, which is a relief I wouldn’t have been able to ask for if anyone had asked me what I needed.
Cornel West has a line that hooks quotes in this chapter: nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. The walk was the most caring thing I’d done for myself in weeks. The version of nihilism that lives in me, the voice that says nothing matters and nothing will help, didn’t survive the walk. It came back later, of course. It always does. But for three hours something smaller and slower was happening, and there’s no fight with smaller and slower. There’s only refusing it, or going.
A love ethic, in the end, isn’t what I believe. It’s what one day, occasionally, accidentally, begins to look like.
What does the design of my day say about what I actually value?
Where am I still confusing motion for progress, or productivity for care?
What would change if I stopped trying to make every hour earn its keep?
Who or what is asking me to slow down to the pace at which love can actually happen?
