Mid-January: Making the Mundane Sacred

Anna Guerrini, a guest contributor, reflects on the importance of forming rituals.

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Whenever a new year begins, we like to think about what we should change. We resolve to lose weight and gain muscle, scroll less and read more, lay off the alcohol and take up a new hobby. We do not often think about what we should keep the same.

Our culture has become one of constant reinvention. Trends now last months instead of decades, and in the age of excess consumerism, it's just so easy to become someone new. Buy new clothes, throw out your old ones. Do your makeup right, buy some protein powder and weights and why not take up pickleball? Everyone's playing pickleball, which can't you? Buy a paddle on Amazon, $19.99, and let your yoga mat collect dust in some closet full of past identities.

I am not criticizing the desire to improve. That, needless to say, is a good thing. I have New Year's resolutions of my own – less screen time being the biggest one. I am not even criticizing pickleball. But there is a difference between improvement and reinvention, and only one of those things is necessary.

In my experience, an important part of forming a stable sense of identity, one not subject to a constant need to change from external forces, is having rituals.

I spend my summers working at a Boy Scout camp, where life is defined by cycles of rituals. Hourly, daily, and weekly, we can expect the same. We raise the flag at 8:00 in the morning, so we line up for march-in at 7:45, dress the lines at 7:50, and march in at 7:56. Opening campfire is 8:00 at night every Sunday, during which we perform the exact same skits in the exact same order. We all begin our merit badge classes, of which we teach two daily, with the same opening spiel. I can recite my friend Wes's welcome monologue verbatim. I begin every day at the waterfront by taking off my hiking boots, shoving my regulation length and color socks into them and sitting on the edge of the dock for a couple of minutes, adjusting to the numbing cold of the mountain water. I end the workday by reversing the procedure.

Rituals improve mental health. A study by researchers at Harvard Business School found that people who perform rituals improve their performance on various tasks by decreasing their anxiety. In an article–funnily enough in the Harvard Business Review–Scott Berinto writes about the power of rituals in dealing with grief: “Most important for the world right now, when we are all facing both actual and anticipated grief, these idiosyncratic rituals can restore our sense of control over our lives. We feel out of control when we experience loss – we didn’t want it to happen, but we couldn’t control it. That is, in and of itself, a very unpleasant feeling, that sense that you’re not in charge of your life. Rituals restore some of that control.” A study by Maurice Eisenbruch conducted among Cambodian immigrants found that an inability to perform rituals, especially those we associate with our culture and identity, cause bereavement, anxiety, and depression.

Throughout the entirety of history, people across the world have recognized the importance of rituals, both personal and societal. Christians attend church on Sunday, and practicing Catholics count the rosary. The act of practicing rituals is almost as ancient as humanity itself: we have archeological evidence of people ritualistically burning spearheads in a cave with a snake carving in Botswana that date back 70,000 years. In religion, rituals serve both as a mechanism to reduce anxiety and uncertainty (a prayer that a loved one's plane lands safely) and a way to affirm the values instilled by that religion (fasting during Ramadan reflects self-discipline and empathy towards the less fortunate). The world changed around these religions; it grew cities and smokestacks and highways. The religions themselves changed, shifting to the predominant social and cultural norms of their temporal and physical location. And yet, the rituals stay the same.

Rituals are a conservation of identity in the face of change. In our fast-paced, global, digital world, change buzzes in the air constantly like static electricity, Our identity can very easily become lost in this change, our memories from a few years ago feeling like they belong to a different person – one who dressed differently, consumed media we know cringe at, and had vocal habits that now feel foreign on our tongue. This loss of ritual, needless to say, is not good for us.

I invite you to include a ritual in your New Year's resolutions. Promise to yourself that you will keep something the same. Take a facet of your daily routine and make it sacrosanct, a moment of reflection and appreciation for the version of you that you are right now and all previous iterations of your identity, not the Platonic ideal of a future self that you have in your head.

Personally, I drink my coffee every weekday at 10:05. I take it hot and black in a plain white mug with a splash of water to cool it down. Before I open the morning news, I look down into it and watch the foam pop and settle into a deep black well. I allow the steam to fog my glasses until the world becomes a dreamy puddle of light and shadow. I thank God for giving me eyes to see and hands to feel warmth radiating through ceramic.

After that, I can make no predictions. Sometimes a friend sits down with me and we chat before class, sometimes I get sidetracked working through isomorphisms or annotating a novel. The New York Times Connections game, my forbidden lover, often tempts me away from more productive uses of my time.

But the coffee always stays the same.

Literature and Philosophy

This letter was inspired, by way of many tangential free associations, by The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli. It discusses the physics of time according to the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics while also reflecting on what time and scientific discovery mean for us as humans. The physics is fascinating and written so that any layman or amateur enthusiast can understand it. But even if you aren't especially interested in why time goes forwards (or even "goes” at all), the book is still a beautiful and hopeful meditation on the human condition through the eyes of physicists.

Every moment of our existence is linked by a peculiar triple thread to our past—the most recent and the most distant—by memory. Our present swarms with traces of our past. We are histories of ourselves, narratives. I am not this momentary mass of flesh reclined on the sofa typing the letter a on my laptop; I am my thoughts full of the traces of the phrases that I am writing; I am my mother’s caresses, and the serene kindness with which my father calmly guided me; I am my adolescent travels; I am what my reading has deposited in layers in my mind; I am my loves, my moments of despair, my friendships, what I’ve written, what I’ve heard; the faces engraved on my memory. I am, above all, the one who a minute ago made a cup of tea for himself. The one who a moment ago typed the word “memory” into his computer. The one who just composed the sentence that I am now completing. If all this disappeared, would I still exist? I am this long, ongoing novel. My life consists of it.

And it seems to me that life, this brief life, is nothing other than this: the incessant cry of these emotions that drive us, that we sometimes attempt to channel in the name of a god, a political faith, in a ritual that reassures us that, fundamentally, everything is in order, in a great and boundless love—and the cry is beautiful. Sometimes it is a cry of pain. Sometimes it is a song. And song, as Augustine observed, is the awareness of time. It is time. It is the hymn of the Vedas that is itself the flowering of time. In the Benedictus of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, the song of the violin is pure beauty, pure desperation, pure joy. We are suspended, holding our breath, feeling mysteriously that this must be the source of meaning. That this is the source of time. Then the song fades and ceases. “The silver thread is broken, the golden bowl is shattered, the amphora at the fountain breaks, the bucket falls into the well, the earth returns to dust.” And it is fine like this. We can close our eyes, rest. This all seems fair and beautiful to me. This is time.