In the previous post I talked about secular rituals, and today I observed a quarterly ritual: executing a symmetry of the mattress — namely, flipping or rotating the mattress. Today was a mattress flip. Since I must unmake the bed, I also wash the bed linens and then remake the bed, the final step of the ritual. (I wash bed linens at other times as well, but this washing is part of the mattress ritual.)
The day began with the ritual of the morning shave, already mentioned. That’s a daily ritual, like the caffeine ritual that follows it.
A few years ago, I stopped drinking coffee because I didn’t like being dependent on it. I had learned that if I didn’t drink coffee, I would experience intense headaches for a few days. I dislike being controlled, and I disliked feeling controlled by coffee: if I didn’t drink it, it would punish me with headaches. (A friend told me that he thinks of the morning cup of coffee as an excellent way to prevent headaches. I see how nicely he has reframed the phenomenon, but I am unpersuaded.)
I rebelled against coffee by switching to tea. I luckily live where there’s an excellent local tea-monger, Murchie’s. I have a fair number of their teas, and my morning ritual involved selecting the tea of the day, boiling 2 cups of water (or almost boiling, for oolongs and green teas).
Murchie’s like to blend green and black teas, as for their venerable No. 10 blend (and in many other blends as well — Queen Victoria, Baker Street Blend, Hatley Castle Blend, and more). Murchie was a Scotsman, and I believe that his clan tartan must have been green and black. For the green and black blends, I use boiling water.
After steeping the tea for 4 minutes, I pour it into my Joveo Temperfect mug, which immediately cools it to a good drinking temperature and then keeps it at that temperature for hours.
Recently, though, I have been persuaded that coffee has health benefits that I should not ignore. So I have resumed having coffee, but to avoid addiction, I drink coffee only three days a week: Wednesday and the weekend.
Coffee, of course, has its own ritual: weighing the beans, grinding them, and then brewing the coffee. I use a Clever Coffee dripper, and the sequence is ritualistic:
1) Measure out 2 cups of water and pour it into the electric kettle and turn it on.
2) While the water heats, put a filter into the dripper and rinse it with hot tap water.
3) Weigh out 30g of coffee beans, grind them fine in the electric spice & herb grinder, then pour them into the dripper. (As with tea, I source from local vendors, and we are fortunate in having several excellent coffee-roasting shops.)
4) When the water boils, I pour it all into the dripper and start the timer.
5) After 2 minutes, I remove the dripper lid and stir the coffee gently.
6) After 1.5 minutes more, I put the dripper on the mug so the coffee drains into the mug.
The caffeine of the day (tea or coffee) accompanies my usual breakfast, a chia pudding, whose evening preparation is another daily ritual that I enjoy, each step clear in my mind as I move easily through the steps of preparation. It’s interesting how many tales of magic involve the preparation of some food, though rarely pudding.
These daily rituals are so familiar and practiced that I can do them easily, but since I treat them as rituals, I pay attention to what I’m doing. I focus on what I’m doing and on what results. I can stay in the moment because I don’t have to think about what the next step will be. Familiarity keeps me oriented, and practice provides a skill I can enjoy. The entire ritual is a pleasure if I pay attention to it.
I could, of course, treat these same tasks as chores rather than rituals, and do them without focusing on the activity but with minimal attention (which would probably often result in an unsatisfactory result), but that approach would forego the daily pleasure the rituals provide. I can do these things so that I enjoy them, or I can do them as a chore. The choice seems easy to me.