The Art of Ritual
30/06/2015 11:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
izmeinaIn this bit of the world June 30th is the equivalent of Goblin New Year’s Eve. A time to make grand plans for the future, to get finances and savings sorted and all that sort of boring stuff. Due to a very ancient and almost anal habit of keeping a little black book to record every single silver sickle spent, keeping the money monsters under control has never been particularly difficult. I decided to go the whole hog last June and to switch over from using a normal calendar diary to a bright shiny new 2014/2015 Financial Year diary starting on Tuesday 1st July 2014.
Tonight it finally gets laid to rest while the promise of a bright shiny clean slate beckons.
After dusting off an old unused 2009 diary a few months ago, it was very tempting to go back to the old ways and to use it for the rest of this calendar year especially as there’s a whole stack of big fat old diaries just ready to be dusted off and recycled for the next six years or so. But this new habit was too useful to dump so I went and spent the princely sum of 5 silver sickles for a bright shiny new blue page to a day financial year diary.
But 1st July is the start of a whole bunch of other new adventures. Firstly there’s Camp Nanowrimo which will be the last visit for a long time. The days of squiggling stuff are almost over. Now it’s time to harvest all those words and do something useful with them. There is also a local annual event amongst the greenie tree hugging sort called “Plastic Free July” where all participants aim to refrain from using all sorts of single use plastic packaging which includes not just disposable plastic shopping bags but plastic wrapping in any shape or form . To take the challenge seriously means that 3/4 of an average supermarket is off limits. Most bread these days comes in plastic wrapping. The majority of milk comes in plastic bottles and cheese of course is also wrapped in plastic. Only the cheapest and nastiest of toilet paper comes wrapped in paper and of course most of the junk food such as chips, biscuits and sweets come in plastic wrapping. At least most decent icecream and chocolate is still kosher.
Apparently a major side effect of this venture is a drastic increase in home cooking and consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables.
As if all this were not sufficient, Petunia has added another item to the list. She is signing up for “Dry July” and wants ickle Izzie for company. That might be just the thing needed for a month of squiggling. So there’s half a bottle of wine left in the Lair that needs to be quaffed before the witching hour of midnight.
But of all these strange and crazy rituals, the one that I am most pleased with started almost by accident. There’s something about the evening before a day off that seems to induce a sense of anticipation and extra energy. For 17 long years Wednesday afternoon was my Friday and it was the best day for getting stuff done such as the laundry and gardening. These days it’s Tuesdays and Fridays. (Lazy Izzie only works 3 days a week these days and none of it is paid work)
So what began as a Tuesday bathroom blitz soon extended to the loo and laundry. The strangest thing of all was that it was not tiring but rather energizing to go on this weekly cleaning binge. Soon sweeping Sunday and mopping Monday got added to the list of rituals and before long the Lair was looking spick and span, bright and shiny, neat and tidy. The reign of CHAOS (Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome) was slowly coming to an end. Got to thinking, if I had known it was that easy to keep the Lair in order, would have started years ago. But in some ways it was precisely visiting the Izzie sister overseas, observing her little rites and rituals and being rather homesick for the Lair that made this whole new mindset possible in the first place.
The fact of having decided to go to visit her last year and having a bright shiny new passport as well as the ticket within less than 10 days of that decision so close to Christmas also made it clear that often the biggest obstacle to most goals is wishy washy woolliness and lack of commitment.
That visit was at first followed by a period of doom and gloom with a dozen dementors taking up residence. Transitioning from the depths of a gloomy doomy rainy Amsterdam winter to a sizzling steamy 40 celsius summer in the space of a day definitely did not help. But during that time I attended a fascinating lecture about the power of habits which ‘start as cobwebs and end as cables’ and figured it was time to indulge in a bit of creation rather than just letting evolution take its unpredictable course.
Now that a whole bunch of important things such as cleaning and saving for bills have been put on autopilot. It’s interesting to note that it takes less time to get more done and very little mental effort at all as compared to the awful states of indecisiveness where even thinking about doing something was exhausting as there was just so much it was impossible to know where to even begin.
On the eve of Camp Nano, it is amusing to think that Nanowrimo proved to be the first testing ground for the serpent on the art of creating rituals or habits for getting stuff done. The seemingly impossible task of writing 50,000 words in 30 days was not so daunting when done in itsy bitsy steps, slowly and steadily plodding along every single day.
It’s satisfying to know that it’s been useful training for so many other things even if not a single word from all those years ever sees the light of day.
Tonight it finally gets laid to rest while the promise of a bright shiny clean slate beckons.
After dusting off an old unused 2009 diary a few months ago, it was very tempting to go back to the old ways and to use it for the rest of this calendar year especially as there’s a whole stack of big fat old diaries just ready to be dusted off and recycled for the next six years or so. But this new habit was too useful to dump so I went and spent the princely sum of 5 silver sickles for a bright shiny new blue page to a day financial year diary.
But 1st July is the start of a whole bunch of other new adventures. Firstly there’s Camp Nanowrimo which will be the last visit for a long time. The days of squiggling stuff are almost over. Now it’s time to harvest all those words and do something useful with them. There is also a local annual event amongst the greenie tree hugging sort called “Plastic Free July” where all participants aim to refrain from using all sorts of single use plastic packaging which includes not just disposable plastic shopping bags but plastic wrapping in any shape or form . To take the challenge seriously means that 3/4 of an average supermarket is off limits. Most bread these days comes in plastic wrapping. The majority of milk comes in plastic bottles and cheese of course is also wrapped in plastic. Only the cheapest and nastiest of toilet paper comes wrapped in paper and of course most of the junk food such as chips, biscuits and sweets come in plastic wrapping. At least most decent icecream and chocolate is still kosher.
Apparently a major side effect of this venture is a drastic increase in home cooking and consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables.
As if all this were not sufficient, Petunia has added another item to the list. She is signing up for “Dry July” and wants ickle Izzie for company. That might be just the thing needed for a month of squiggling. So there’s half a bottle of wine left in the Lair that needs to be quaffed before the witching hour of midnight.
But of all these strange and crazy rituals, the one that I am most pleased with started almost by accident. There’s something about the evening before a day off that seems to induce a sense of anticipation and extra energy. For 17 long years Wednesday afternoon was my Friday and it was the best day for getting stuff done such as the laundry and gardening. These days it’s Tuesdays and Fridays. (Lazy Izzie only works 3 days a week these days and none of it is paid work)
So what began as a Tuesday bathroom blitz soon extended to the loo and laundry. The strangest thing of all was that it was not tiring but rather energizing to go on this weekly cleaning binge. Soon sweeping Sunday and mopping Monday got added to the list of rituals and before long the Lair was looking spick and span, bright and shiny, neat and tidy. The reign of CHAOS (Can’t Have Anyone Over Syndrome) was slowly coming to an end. Got to thinking, if I had known it was that easy to keep the Lair in order, would have started years ago. But in some ways it was precisely visiting the Izzie sister overseas, observing her little rites and rituals and being rather homesick for the Lair that made this whole new mindset possible in the first place.
The fact of having decided to go to visit her last year and having a bright shiny new passport as well as the ticket within less than 10 days of that decision so close to Christmas also made it clear that often the biggest obstacle to most goals is wishy washy woolliness and lack of commitment.
That visit was at first followed by a period of doom and gloom with a dozen dementors taking up residence. Transitioning from the depths of a gloomy doomy rainy Amsterdam winter to a sizzling steamy 40 celsius summer in the space of a day definitely did not help. But during that time I attended a fascinating lecture about the power of habits which ‘start as cobwebs and end as cables’ and figured it was time to indulge in a bit of creation rather than just letting evolution take its unpredictable course.
Now that a whole bunch of important things such as cleaning and saving for bills have been put on autopilot. It’s interesting to note that it takes less time to get more done and very little mental effort at all as compared to the awful states of indecisiveness where even thinking about doing something was exhausting as there was just so much it was impossible to know where to even begin.
On the eve of Camp Nano, it is amusing to think that Nanowrimo proved to be the first testing ground for the serpent on the art of creating rituals or habits for getting stuff done. The seemingly impossible task of writing 50,000 words in 30 days was not so daunting when done in itsy bitsy steps, slowly and steadily plodding along every single day.
It’s satisfying to know that it’s been useful training for so many other things even if not a single word from all those years ever sees the light of day.
