the importance of rituals
Routine is disguised ritual (David Whyte)
Recently, a lot of my time has been spent walking in silence, taking in the sights and sounds of the city, the occasional bird song mixed in with the regular police sirens. It’s been a few months living in London and I’m enjoying the novelty of everything. On weekends, I’m out of the flat 95%+ of the time, and even if there is nothing planned, I just pick a direction and walk and see what comes up.
It’s insane to me how much culture, diversity and art exists. London has been described as a lonely city, but I’ve found that there are infinite number of communities to join, it’s just about scheduling it on the calendar. The act of finding these communities, of showing up consistently, becomes its own ritual - a weekly reminder that connection requires presence.
Even with so much novelty however, you can’t help but fall into a routine. Working a 9-5 job provides this automatically, but even the smaller routines of which coffee shops you visit, or the activities you do or the restaurants you visit.
This made me think about ritual. I was having lunch with my sister/brother in law (soon to be), and joked that we seem to be having lunch every Sunday now. I realised it’s a ritual, and it’s not a bad thing to call it that. It’s nice to have a regularity to your week, actually scheduling it on the calendar. I thought about what other rituals I have, and what rituals I would like to have.
I used to regularly go climbing on Tuesday and Thursday evenings with the same people. I’m coming to realise that this was a ritual. It wasn’t about the climbing, it was just about the regularity of coming together. In our atomised digital world, we are losing meeting up in third spaces. I would like this back.
I want to try shape my life to have these social rituals. Some ideas : weekly climbing group, running club, yoga. It needs to be low effort. This is where physical proximity matters a lot for cultivating friendships and relationships.
Internal rituals
I was thinking about the unseen internal rituals one has. Call them habits if you want another word. How do you routinely/habitually use your mind? What kind of thoughts do you think? What kind of feelings do you allow to surface and how do you judge this? Where and how do you direct your attention?
We know that ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’. Repetitive action forms deep grooves in the mind where what was once deliberate action becomes automatic and often unseen.
Examples of internal rituals flow through our daily lives: practicing gratitude for one’s circumstances, mindful self-talk and esteem, cultivating a sense of agency, and the way you greet someone - wishing them well internally with compassion for others.
Vacuuming
On retreats, you are usually given a small task that you spend 1 - 1.5 hours a day doing. On the last retreat I went on, I was given vacuuming. I hate vacuuming. It’s a close second to ironing.
But I decided to really bring my practice to the act. On the first day, I realised that I never actually paid attention when hoovering (probably never in my entire life unto that point). I always saw it as something to get ‘done’ rather than a process that one can bring their attention to.
One image that kept on coming up for me, was that of Hirayama, from the recent film ‘Perfect Days’. The level of care and attention he brought to cleaning toilets in Tokyo was that of a zen monk.
I tried to embody this level of attention to hoovering and mopping the floors. By the end of the retreat, hoovering was pure bliss. I made something mundane and previously disliked, into a beautiful act of creativity and care all through the attention brought to it. This attention to the mundane opens doors to seeing transitions everywhere in our lives. Each moment can be a threshold, a chance to pause and notice.
Thresholds
Routine’s / rituals can serve as a boundary between moments during the day. Coming from a long day of work, what do you do? What habits do you have to wind down?
Even something as simple as when you walk through a door- you can create a ritual of this. I’m reminded of walking through the torii gates in Japan, it’s customary to bow. The bowing is just a ritual; a gentle reminder to pay attention. And in the act, you are transformed.
Daily anchoring rituals are powerful if noticed. There was this rule in the recent Zen retreat that when one leaves the zendo, you walk such that your right foot is the first to touch the ground when exiting. Just a small reminder again. Pay attention.
Just existing, I find these thresholds everywhere - my daily train commute feels different each time if you pay attention. Entering the train can be a moment of transition rather than just dead time. These thresholds mark the boundaries between different worlds, different versions of the day.
Similarly you can do the same with other actions. When pulling out your phone, what goes through one’s mind? Most times, it’s automatic - a hand reaching for the pocket before the thought even forms. But what if this too became a threshold? A moment to pause, like bowing at a torii gate, before crossing into the digital world. A breath, a thought, an intention.
These modern thresholds might not have the weight of centuries-old traditions, but they can serve the same purpose - creating space between moments, reminding us to notice the transitions in our daily life.
Routine is the way we worship fully at the altar of the timeless. Routine is the way we step down from what is absolutely extraordinary into the miracle of an ordinary day and an ordinary hour. Routine is disguised ritual.
David Whyte
This entire post is just a reminder of how powerful ritual and routine is in daily life. The small things really are the big things. A picture below I took in Kanazawa.
