Why on Earth Would I Want to Do That?

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.
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[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