In 1925, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski published an essay about the fishermen of the Trobriand Islands, off the coast of New Guinea, where he had done his fieldwork.
In the calm inner lagoon, where the catch was reliable, the fishermen used no magic at all. Out on the open sea, “full of danger and uncertainty,” they used “extensive magical ritual to secure safety and good results.”
The fishermen seemed to need ritual only when they were afraid; the rituals quelled their uncertainty and fears about safety.
I set up Golu again this year after a two-year break. For the uninitiated, Golu is a South Indian Navaratri tradition: dolls of gods, saints, and everyday village scenes are arranged artfully on a set of steps and displayed for nine nights while friends and neighbors drop by. It’s a ritual I’ve been doing for fifteen years now.
If you asked me to explain the reasoning behind every custom, or the backstories behind those dolls, I’d have to get back to you. But I do it anyway.
Rituals seem to do their work before we understand them. They steady us when the outcome is uncertain; they give shapeless stretches of time a beginning and an end, and most of us already have a few, even if we don’t admit it.
Rituals for uncertain times
In 2014, Michael Norton and Francesca Gino ran a set of experiments on rituals and loss. In one, participants in a lab wrote about why they wanted to win $200 and how they’d spend it. Then researchers randomly picked only one person to win. Everyone else lost.
Some of the losers were given a made-up ritual: they drew how they felt for two minutes, then sprinkled a pinch of salt on the paper, tore it up, and counted to ten in their head five times. These participants reported feeling less grief and more in control than the people who only drew how they felt.
It was almost as if the ritual offered them something to do, when there was nothing useful left to do. Moreover, nothing about the steps had anything to do with the original $200 game.
Most of us have moments in life when we inherently know we have no control over the situation: waiting on test results, processing a work promotion that didn’t come through, steeling ourselves for a difficult conversation, etc. Our brains hate that loss of control. So, they go looking for something they can control. That’s where rituals help. It hands our lost brains a small, finite task with a clear ending.
Rituals give time edges
Grief and anxiety have no defined edges. Rituals help us draw an outline around such stretches of time. It can also help alleviate boredom and the monotony of life itself.
For me, Golu season has become that ritual. Between when the dolls come out and when they go back into their boxes, my social life gets a jolt of energy when I get to see people I typically don’t see all year.
By the ninth night, I feel two things at once. There’s a sense of happiness at recharging my social battery and having done something different, and there’s relief, of course, because it’s a time-consuming ritual and, frankly, a lot of work.
When I wrote about impermanence, I mentioned Tibetan monks who spend days or weeks building an intricate sand mandala and then sweep it away. Sweeping is part of the practice, as much as building is.
We have more rituals than we admit
Most of us don’t call what we do rituals. We call them habits or quirks.
In my post on creatures of habit, I wrote about being able to tell it’s 7 a.m. (plus or minus 10 minutes) because my mother is on her indoor morning walk, pacing between the kitchen and the door. In that post, I called routines like hers “the last bastion of a sense of self-control,” which more or less was what the fishermen were after.
How we make our coffee, the route we take on the last mile of a run, the song we play in the car on our way to an important client meeting are all some form of ritual. They matter to us more than we give them credit for.
Strangely enough, the name we give them seems to matter. In a 2016 study led by Alison Wood Brooks, people had to sing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” in front of a stranger. (which, in my opinion, could be about as mortifying as what the fishermen faced in turbulent seas). Participants who first did a short ritual (draw your feelings, sprinkle salt, count aloud, throw the paper away) had lower heart rates, felt less anxious, and sang better. When they described a similar set of steps as “a few random behaviors,” it worked less well.
I don’t plan to start sprinkling salt on my to-do list. But I’m going to be more deliberate about the rituals I already have and mark the beginning and end. Maybe five minutes of quiet and putting my phone away before starting on the next hard task. Then, when the task is finished, I might call a friend, take a walk, or shut my laptop screen to signal to my brain that the hard part is over.
Experts say it works.
“If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think.” G.K. Chesterton, The Thing (1929)