Tag: patterns

Enriching Rituals

I woke up this morning and turned up the heat a notch on the thermostat.

Chilly morning.

I gathered the contents of several random garbage bins and put their contents into a bigger kitchen garbage bag.

Then, I took the bigger bag outside to the curb and heaved it into the big green garbage bin that will be collected shortly by municipal workers.

I came back in the house. I fed the cat. Made a cup of coffee. Loaded and started the dishwasher. Returned to my “writing” chair to take my daily meds and write this post.

Almost all tasks were accomplished on auto-pilot.

I am big on “to-do” and checklists generally. They impose order and a sense of achievement.

At the same time, I am struck by how so many of our daily chores are done on rote. Automatically without much thinking.

This is desirable as my neurons are not firing a mile a minute until quite some time after I have woken from sleep and suffused my body in caffeine. If I had to think consciously about what to do to get the day started, there could be an unseemly delay in getting anything done at all.

The daily rituals we follow and patterns we establish in our lives can be both a help and a hindrance. Unexamined, they can find us stuck in unsatisfying ruts. But they also help. Because of daily habits and rituals, getting through the mundanities of our lives does not require a lot of thinking.

Imagine waking up every morning and having to write a “to-do” list just to get your day started. Profoundly inefficient. And memory issues are bound to arise up the road. That could lead to awkwardness if, say, we forgot to put on pants before leaving the house because it wasn’t on “the list.”

So with company visiting, I am struck by the existing taken-for-granted-ness in my own daily rituals and patterns. Company does not know where everything (anything?) is. Company does not know where anything (everything?) goes. Not yet anyway.

They are learning my environment as I have had to create it. When I arrived in this new house a few months ago, I didn’t know where anything went either. I had to figure out where to put things. I’m still figuring that out.

I had to organize the things about me and create systems in an unfamiliar environment. That may sound straightforward to people who grew up in stable, well-organized homes.

I didn’t grow up in such a home so every efficient organizational decision is a small and very personal victory. 

I have frequently enjoyed (too many times to count) the hospitality of our company on their home turf. Watching dinner preparation unfold between them was always akin to watching the operation of a well-oiled machine.

There is a choreography and unspoken layers of foundational understanding between them. This foundation makes the whole process unfold seamlessly with unfailingly delicious results at the dinner table.

In matters of hospitality and meal creation, I am a clunky awkward adolescent. I have some tools to contribute to meal-making and a few tricks up my sleeve. I’ve never starved or inflicted food poisoning on my kids or anyone else I care about. That’s a good track record and starting point.

But I was a single person for much of my adult life. Most of the hospitality I longed to offer was lived in a dream state. Or in my role as an Airbnb hostess.

There were several satisfying social events in that hosting context, if infrequent. A while ago, I decided I want more social outings with friends in my life. I want to be more hospitable more often and have people over for visits and meals.

Yesterday, the nub of that dream was realized. He commandeered the bar-b-q and grilled the steaks to perfection (as he always does). She took over the prep and set the table perfectly (as she always does).

I chipped in with necessary elements of the meal I was pleased to have at hand: dishes, and, glassware, and cutlery, and serving dishes, and my own special vegetable contribution.

This elaboration may seem flaky and a little foolish to those who have enjoyed the easy patterns of long marriage and hospitality every day for decades.

To actually actualize these commonplace rituals at a later stage in my life is both a wistful and deeply appreciated development.

My husband and I moved into our new house several months ago. Our visiting company and falling into routines and sharing a perfect and delicious meal together christened the space.

Our house has officially become a home.

I am grateful to these old friends who, by their presence, have proven the inherent value of hospitality and sharing our space I secretly longed for.

Their presence has diminished the anxiety I felt about my ability to pull it off. To be fair, they are also very forgiving of my shortcomings

More sharing and socializing is a ritual and pattern I am eager to establish in my life. It means more to me, I figure, as it has been absent and a distant goal in my life until only recently.

Beyond grateful for the opportunity. Time to get those housewarming party invitations out – stat.

Chaos and Order

We long for order. We fight for order. We spend money on boxes, bins, baskets, labels, label makers, file labels, file folders, file cabinets, cupboards, closets, containers, crypts, efficiency experts, and efficiency systems. All to create to order.

We despair when order eludes us. I sure do. I think this longing for order and certainty is a metaphor for fighting against life’s inevitable outcome. We all disappear and dissolve into chaos eventually. We depart this world. This is non-negotiable. Not knowing what awaits us after death (if anything) has been the subject of speculation for centuries.

Still, we often negotiate like crazy against impending darkness and often do so right up until the very end. For all the good it does us. I think I have devised a way to make friends with death. Well, my own death anyway. I have lived so many realities in my time on this planet and have never settled all that comfortably into any of them.

When your early life begins in chaos, you learn to distrust order. You long for it but when it is upended and taken away so often, order becomes suspect and sterile. People living in peace and order – went my dysfunctional thinking – live in denial and delusion. Not only that, their lives are undoubtedly dry and boring. This was my comfortable justification for something I did not have and was uncertain I could ever achieve.

It is true that on this planet, order is essential to success. That is why we have a gazillion systems and products and recommendations for how to achieve it. To play the game of life successfully (in our culture, at least), you must have your ducks in a row. At law school, I met earnest young lawyers-to-be who were not particularly intellectually gifted, but I was consumed by suffering and envy for the order in their course notes.

My cousin Pat Good is a quilter and more generally, a fabric artist. Quilting requires order and an ungodly level of patience and stick-to-it-ism. As do any of the creative arts. Would you read this if my thoughts and words were helter-skelter all over the page and disconnected? I didn’t think so.

Writing has been a discipline of self-imposed order on a chaotic environment. Mom betrayed me? I wrote down exactly what she did (supported my ex-husband over me) and how I felt about it (confused and devastated, naturally). I don’t trust my memory more than anyone else should. But when it is right there, written down in blue and white (my preferred inkpen color), years later, I can still read and recall the truth of that moment.

That has helped me in many ways. When I was being gaslighted by my mother or ridiculed and dismissed by my mother, the journals I kept took me back to my truth as it had been in that moment.

There was one particularly telling exchange with my mother. I told her I kept a journal and had written down the details of our many confrontations after they happened and her decidedly unmotherly actions: “You could have made all that up!” she chortled. But I didn’t.

There is order I see and believe in daily and that is in nature. Unlike humans, nature doesn’t busy itself with running around changing its’ environment willy-nilly exclusively for power and monetary gain. The path of nature unfolds in some kind of divine order that I am never going to fully get in this lifetime.

We are born but let’s face it, we don’t know where the hell we came from. We know the biology and have fiddled with that dramatically in recent years. But where does the spark of creation come from? Damned if I know.

What I do know or believe is in “ashes to ashes and dust to dust.” we came from the great formlessness and to it we will one day return. I am slowly getting this. In our writer’s group the other day, the ethereal and spiritually evolved Anrael Lovejoy said words to the effect – lest I misquote her – “We are formless before we are conceived and after death, return to formlessness.” Ever insightful and a thinker of deep thoughts is my friend, Anrael.

Everything we do – from birth to grave in the middle – are finger-tapping exercises. Best then that we have fun with the time we’ve been allotted.