Rituals

I grew up with strong rituals, a set hour for bedtime and arising the next morning, three meals served much the same time each day, every day, home by 6:00 each evening.

A day for laundry.

A day for ironing, etc. Dependable, scheduled, ritualized.

Raised in a Catholic Church and attending a parochial school  further entrenched age old rituals that were engrained down through generations, becoming an integral part of one’s being.

We are a ritualized society, ruled by the seasons, accomplishing tasks in a time of accepted norms which, we, for the most part, take for granted. We appropriately grow up, attend school, marry, produce children, age, and die in a continual cycle, ritualized norms that no one thinks too much about but participates in.

The COVID-19 pandemic arrived and caused major chaos in our everyday lives and perhaps can be attributed to a major shift and loss of some rituals. Norms were skewed, time rearranged, employment schedules, if working or not, changed, and children were home, underfoot and demanding 24/7.

Without guided direction tempers flared, depression rose and mental health issues, some decidedly hidden, became ignited fuses of catastrophe while we learned how to cook and shop in isolation, dealing with empty shelves, social distancing, and loneliness, loss of taken for granted without known rituals for survival. Those folks who had historically adhered to rituals seem to have had an easier adjustment but then each individual determined for themselves what that looked like.

Given all that has occurred these past 15 or so months, the major adjustments made, and the loss of the tried and true, will determine which rituals get reconstructed, which discarded, and how many of the newly established get assimilated in our society. We were given a strong lesson in which our society had no rituals for, our lives disrupted, put back together again, and exposed to new norms.

What will our new rituals look like in the future? Or will we resuscitate our old rituals? Each of us can choose!