I’ve been blogging since May, 2007. It was twice a week until August, 2013, then daily since then. I don’t do tags, but I have been making lists of all my posts, organized by year. If you click “Posts” on the sidebar,
you will see a page like this:
And if you click on one of the years, say 2013, you will see all of the posts published that year starting with the last one. Each title is a link to the relevant post. (The screenshot only shows the last few in December.)
In general it only takes a little more time to keep the list up to date, as long as I don’t get too far behind. But what about the over eight weeks I missed after my fall on July 21? Then the question was, was it worth doing all that work to catch up? Wouldn’t it make more sense to simplify my life and no longer do the list? I wasn’t sure until two nights ago, when I decided “nope” and started to fill in some of the gaps. Then last night I decided to bite the bullet and finish the whole thing.
But why do it? Because blogging is important to me and keeping the list is my personal ritual honoring its importance.
The truth is, we humans are ritual beings. We ritualize everything from birth to death to the way we make our morning coffee. And there’s a reason: ritual is a way of putting a pin in the map of our lives and saying “this matters”—a way of marking the important moments in our days, seasons, and years.
—-
[Ritual] is simply action imbued with meaning and intention; a way to slow down time and truly notice our lives.
—Jesse Harrold, Why Rituals Matter
Do you have any rituals? Changing decorations to honor the seasons is an important one for a lot of people. I personally don’t do that, but I love seeing what other people do. Can you think of any other personal rituals?
September 27, 2024
rituals
I’m thinking – but can’t “see” any stand out one or two or even a dozen
when I lived in Auckland I got up between 7.45 and 8am but now I don’t have so much to do…so that’s gone out the window!
🙂
Eating and sleeping are good rituals. Shopping, cooking, watching TV … now that’s a good one.
God bless.
🙂
I don’t know if you would call them rituals or not but I am a creature of habit. I fall into routines and tend to follow them quite strictly. That makes it tough to fit other things in sometimes.
Habits can be comforting, but every once in a while it pays to stand back and re-evaluate them.
I used to always pur the Christmas tree up on Thanksgiving and take it down the day after Christmas. The past two or three years I have not followed my timeline.
I love it when blogs have their years listed…blogger does it for us if we choose. Some people dont, and there are so many times I wish they did. I would love to go back to their first post.
My blog has Archives by month in the sidebar, so I/anyone can go bak in time…to the very beginning. I like it when other blogs have that option.
…blogging has become my job in retirement.
Same here.
Wow, you beat me by a year … I can’t believe it took me so long to find you. (LOL — thanks Sandra!)
That excerpt about rituals is oddly comforting; it validates my intuitions, my actions. I could be brutally honest and cite a few, but some would think me crazy OCD.
Whatever works for us, we get to choose thank goodness.
Rituals are the things we do without much thought. At least for me. Coffee in the morning, sitting at my computer reading blogs. Laundry on Monday. Afternoon reading. My old rituals concerning decorating for Christmas have fallen away over the years.
I’ve stopped decorating for Christmas several years ago.
We are some of the onces that put out different decor for every season and every holiday.
Even though I don’t do it myself, I enjoy seeing what other people do.
I have a file where I record my weight each and every day. And I log other “important” things I’ve done each day, like “went to the grocery store”, “went to the library”, “baked 4 dozen cookies”. That last one was today. I don’t know if they’re rituals or just the products of a ridiculous man, being obsessive.
I think it’s a healthy habit. And it can always be blog fodder.