The Ritual Effect
What did you do today to love, appreciate, laugh, mourn, savor, experience just a little bit more? What more can you do tomorrow?
Have you ever had a day when you feel like you are just going through the motions? If so, The Ritual Effect offers ancient wisdom with a contemporary twist to help you infuse those motions with meaning.
The author, Michael Norton, insists there’s still a place for ritual in our increasingly secular and isolated world. Coming from a large Catholic family surrounded by cultural and religious rituals, Norton overcame his initial skepticism. In his research and everyday life, he found that rituals offer our age something it sorely lacks: shared meaning.
Ritual may sound alien to the postmodern mind, but we inherit all sorts of rituals from our culture, our families, and even from our places of work. Indeed, we practice them all the time. As the author slyly observes, lighting a cake on fire and singing around it once a year would be rather bizarre if singing “Happy Birthday” did not have significant shared meaning.
I experienced the power of secular ritual as a young man in New York City. Wanting to take advantage of its world-class cultural offerings, I registered for a course called “Masterpieces of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” The class met on Saturday mornings and thus required yet another commute into the city. But those Saturday trips were different; they were more like pilgrimages—freely chosen, with a particular end in mind, to commune with the souls of those who had left behind iconic works of sublime beauty as well as all those who have been moved by them.
Shared meaning is not our only recourse. We can also add meaning to our days by reframing personal routines as rituals. This could be as simple as how we make coffee each morning, how we prepare for an important task, or how we wind down each night. A routine is a set of motions, but a ritual is a conscious act. Such awareness reminds us of not only what we are doing but also why we do it in the first place.
In my recent post Big Changes Start Small, I introduced the power of habit. Carefully cultivated habits constitute WHAT we do when we take up the challenge of consciously leading our lives. Consciously chosen values reveal WHY we lead, as I discussed in Leading from Our Values.
The Ritual Effect speaks to HOW we lead. Executing our routines as rituals injects these activities with an element of joyful celebration. In other words, well-crafted rituals are a gateway to leading (and living) with a full and free heart. No more just going through the motions. When we approach our routines with the focus and reverence usually reserved for ritual, we are renewed and refreshed. The ordinary becomes extraordinary.
The Ritual Effect by Dr. Michael Norton (Scribner, 2024)