On the Nature of Ritual

I think humans must have created ritual as soon as they started forming tribes, maybe before. We seem to do it almost without thinking. We tend to think of ritual as something involving religion. Catholic Mass. Pagans casting a circle. Celebrations of midwinter and new beginnings like birthdays and weddings. Even something as simple as a family dinner, whether you do it every night or just Sunday with the folks. The ritual serves a purpose. It creates a sacred space. Sometimes it’s a physical space, but it’s always cognitive. It shapes our thinking about the world and the activities we engage in.

One of the things I’m working on in my writing practice is consciously invoking my writing ritual. Trying to create a sacred space where my focus—flighty at the best of times—can get a grip on the task at hand. It’s worked in the past, but I’m having a little trouble with it now. It’s the nature of the creative beast, I think. What worked in the past won’t necessarily work in the future. The key to opening one story is the lock that keeps another closed. The lucky T-shirt gets washed with colors. The writing hat disappears one day. Even the rituals that stay intact can lose their influence if/when they fail to create that break—the barrier between the sacred and the profane.

All rituals seem to have a few characteristics in common.

They take some amount of time. A morning commute is a kind of ritual. Whether it’s a 10-minute walk to your office, a half-hour on the highway, or a train ride. That time and physical distance creates a ritual space. While we may swear at the day job on occasion, it’s still a sacred space. The things that happen there are separated from the things that don’t.

They follow a common pattern. We tend to do the same things in the same sequence with only slight variations. The morning coffee. Order of the Mass. The day’s lesson or the invocation of higher powers. Some people say grace before meals.

My writing ritual involves four things:

1. Cognitively, I actively commit to “I’m going to write now.” That seems like an odd thing, but my ADHD brain needs a handle to pull, like a ripcord on a mental parachute to change my velocity.
2. I make sure I have a fresh cup of whatever. Sometimes water, but most often coffee.
3. I put on my headphones, open up my sound effects website, and pick a soundscape. I tend to pick one that’s evocative of the scene I’m about to write—for instance, space stations get airport terminal noises—but I use ocean tracks, temple bells, or really anything that strikes my fancy at the moment.
4. The sound is also my timer. I use their web-based timer so that the sound plays (blocking distracting noises) for the duration of my writing period. I like the 25-minute period. It gives me enough time to get into the story without making it so long that I start looking around for something else. It helps keep me in the sacred space and focused on the magic that happens when words appear on the page. As long as I hear the airport noise or the ocean waves, I know the ritual must continue.

Usually my brain is good with that. Sometimes I break the circle and the demons get released, but that’s another post altogether.

So what’s your ritual? Do you have one? Do you consciously evoke it, or is it something you do without thought, a pattern you follow without really noticing? Can you share it in the comments?