The Importance Of Making Your Own Rituals
More coffee, less voodoo
There is nothing quite like getting the gang together and sacrificing a goat to mark the passage of time. Okay, maybe it’s not so great for the goat, and maybe we as a society have outgrown this sort of ritual along with many others that were born out of religion and superstition.
But just because these rituals seem ridiculous to us now, that doesn’t mean we can’t find value in what they represent. They narrowed us on a moment, focused our attention, and slowed things down by giving that moment significance that it might not have otherwise had.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying that if you sacrifice a goat it’s going to make your birthday party that much more significant (it would certainly make the cleaning more significant). What I’m saying is that there is value in ritual and it is up to us to interpret how we incorporate it into our modern lives.
Like many of us, the first ritual that I knowingly introduced to my life revolved around sport. It was a football ritual which started when I watched Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl before the best game of my life. My passes were inspired, my shots were screamers, and I ended up putting the ball in the back of the net three times, single-handedly dragging my mediocre team to one of our…
