“Routines are concrete repetitive actions that help us develop skills while creating continuity and order. Rituals are routines elevated by creativity, driven by intention, and imbued with meaning.” – Esther Perel
I’ve long been vexed by, what appeared to me to be, arbitrary traditions with unnecessary pomp-and-circumstance that made my insular life a tad more inconvenient. Certainly this has to do with a lack of curiosity on my part, but many rituals have also become disentangled from their original purpose or become followed without much mindfulness. What I have only recently grasped is how important ritual is to social primates as an evolutionary adaptive mechanism.
Awareness of and compensation for our evolutionary biases are not intuitive many times, and any particular cultural meme that fills a need can persist long after the conditions that prompted the meme dissolve. So, what happens when a scientifically reductive cynic like me tries to make sense of these rituals? I end up dismissing them, baby and bathwater alike. I’m not alone, as many disillusioned people are left with a spiritual vacuum that is easily filled by misinformation or magical thinking.
However, after listening to people like Daniel Schmachtenburger and Nora Bateson, it would seem that rituals are as critical to human cohesion as verbal language. And to some degree we accomplish this by celebrating birthdays. Fewer things are more important than acknowledging that someone as skirted the odds and survived another trip around the sun. Can we construct alternatives to the individual (or better yet, the dividual) rituals; rituals we can all share that imbue common meaning without calling on outdated hierarchy, superstition, or rampant commercialism? We like to celebrate the winter solstice at our home. Acknowledging the importance of change of seasons and importance of community to our continued survival. (Also sunbread is yummy)
Maybe we can ritualize the scientific development of people. Perhaps we can have a transparent, explicit and dynamic set of practices that transmit the important cultural information to the next generation.
