The Dark Night Part IV: Ritual

Another way to “fall in love” with the process is through ritual.

Ever feel just …GOOD with doing something ritualistic? I love how rituals and traditions do that. They allow you an excuse, an entrance point in order to access greater sensory perception and joy of what could be a mediocre experience. It’s connoisseur-ship that makes the event “sticky.”

I feel that ritual can be an entrance point to being in the moment. I understand how you can do that with tea or wine, but how do you apply that to writing? Or marketing? How do you view a task in the now without heavily eyeing the future?

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/the-power-of-ritual-conquer-procrastination-time-wasters-and-laziness.html

Lifehacker seems to agree with me on this - the above article, The Power of Ritual, is on the right track but there’s very little in the article to distinguish it from a habit.

http://writeitsideways.com/writing-rituals/

This article gets into the differences between the two, specifically with writing. In it the article outlines a three part structure to ritual:

Anthropologists Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner observed that ritual has three phases:

Separation from everyday activities.
Transition to an unstructured or “liminal” reality, where the participant becomes a walker between the worlds, a traveler at the threshold. (The word “liminal” comes from the Latin limen, meaning “threshold.”) Writing is the ultimate liminal reality.
Reassimilation into normal life, but more deeply than before.

Obviously there are a lot of examples of ritual - There’s even a book on it

http://www.amazon.com/Daily-Rituals-How-Artists-Work/dp/0307273601


The question is: How do I create my own so it emphasizes living in the moment and “falling in love with the process?