Tag: ritual

In Praise of Ordinary Times

My husband and I just got back from a week away from home and are slowly getting back to… normal.  As far as I am concerned, ordinary time is a precious commodity.  While the definitions of ordinary or normal sound pretty boring – “usual, typical, expected” –  I think normal life is undervalued, and I would prefer to define it in terms like “comfortable, relaxed, and reassuring.”  We have our rituals (Thursday is shopping and laundry, Tuesday and Saturday are hike days, Saturday is movie night), but the quiet anticipation of known events nurtures me far more than waiting in crowded airports or sleeping in strange beds.

I know that I am in the minority on this.  Advice columns tell us older folks to keep trying new things, exploring unfamiliar places, stretching our wings.  We have friends who spend half their lives on cruise ships, and others who spend as much time visiting one relative or another.  I would remind everyone that if you peeled back the travel industry’s propaganda, you could find documented risks to the elderly from air travel (blood clots, etc.), cruise ships (petri dishes of germs) and relocations of any kind.   How much more likely are we to fall trying to find a strange bathroom in the middle of the night?

There is a wonderful line in the movie, Mrs. Miniver.  Suffering the deprivations, apprehensions, and demands of life in wartime Britain, Mrs. Miniver (played flawlessly by Greer Garson) thinks back to what normal life was like, and promises herself to cherish it when and if it returns.  The movie was based on a series of newspaper columns by Jan Struther, and in one of them, the writer reflects on her feelings about returning home after a holiday:

Not that she didn’t enjoy the holidays, but she always felt – and it was, perhaps, the measure of her peculiar happiness – a little relieved when they were over.  Her normal life pleased her so well that she was half afraid to step out of its frame in case one day she would find herself unable to get back.

It is true that many old folks have a tendency toward the static, toward ritual, toward constancy.  Our culture works against this and has somewhat tainted what should be one of the major joys of old age.  By now, my readers know that one of my favorite novels is Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent.  Lady Slane, elderly and retired far from children, grandchildren, and obligations, finds life’s “last, supreme luxury” to be the time to sit and reflect, to live a life of one’s own making, to enjoy one’s own quiet habits.

Some Christian churches have periods of what are called “Ordinary Time.”  Generally, they are times that are not special because they are neither just before Christmas and Easter (Advent, Lent) nor just after (Epiphany, Eastertide).  Holy Week is coming up soon, with many churches having a dozen or more services; I’m sure the rectors sometimes long for ordinary time.

Ordinary Time brings me to T.S. Eliot and his poem “Ash Wednesday.”  Eliot seems to rebuff those exhortations that we “stretch” ourselves as we grow older.  Eliot spurns such advice, quoting Shakespeare in the process:

Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man’s gift and that man’s scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?)
Why should I mourn
The vanished power of the usual reign?

I sometimes mourn lost stamina, but I never mourn lost ambition or the impetus of “striving.”  I resist replacing forced imperatives of youth (those of employment and raising children) with self-imposed ones of old age (doing “what is expected of me” or “what is good for me”).  I want to define my own normality.  I want to stay at home and reflect like Lady Slane.  I am accused (often and even by loved ones) of being boring.  However, this agèd eagle is not bored.  And I am not afraid of ordinary times.  I am just happy to be at home among my books and chairs and pots and pans.  And my quiet thoughts.

For the value of ritual, you might try my story about Walden Pond, “Again and Again and Again.”  And, please be assured, if cruises and world tours make you happy, keep at it.  Just don’t expect me to envy you.

Groundhog Life

As I am writing this, it is Groundhog Day. In our neighborhood, it is cold but sunny. The big rodent will most assuredly see his shadow, leaving us six more weeks of winter. Hopefully, not a day more. But, I can’t think about Groundhog Day  without recalling the 1993 Bill Murray movie, where the main character lives the same day over and over again. Recurrences. Purposeful recurrences are sometimes called rituals. Groundhog Day itself is a constructed ritual.

Nietzsche talked about the doctrine of eternal recurrence or return, in which we would live the same life over and over again. Nietzsche even frames it as a thought experiment: “What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more’” (from The Gay Science).Perhaps there is an inference that we might want to live our life in such a way that we would be willing to live it over and over again. Not something easy to consider.

But the rituals of our lives – from the observance of Groundhog Day to the cup of coffee (decaf) after dinner – may be the very fabric of our lives. As we age, rituals may be our salvation.

A number of years ago there was an article in the NY Times about decision-making which discussed how lack of “ritual” or habit could lead to decision-fatigue. Our brains need to ration their energy. The article makes a case for the kind of “semi-rigid” structured life (like mine) which my children regularly make fun of. John Tierney cites research which points out that some people “establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions.”

Rituals minimize decisions. We know what time we are getting up, what’s for breakfast and lunch, and what time we are eating dinner.   I know what day I am going to clean bathrooms, do laundry, go to the gym (without a friend). Very few decisions are left. Thank the good Lord. Boring (perhaps) at times (especially to others), but I don’t really mind. And such a life is seldom chaotic – unless, of course, the rituals get disrupted. And there’s the rub. More on that another time.

But my point is – here and in my story of Walden Pond attached (“Again and Again and Again”) – rituals can comfort, strengthen, inure us to the inevitable. Our attachment to ritual makes us vulnerable, but perhaps less vulnerable than we would be to chaos.