The Hammock Papers: Better.

24 August 2024

Better.

Ari Weinzweig on rituals ...

Not every routine we engage in becomes a ritual. We’ve been throwing out garbage, turning on the lights, and doing financial statements for 42 years. All are important, but, at least from my limited view (I’m not an accountant), none are about the sort of recentering and spiritual uplift that rituals can help us to create. At their base level, they’re a great business practice, a clearly stated job expectation, and a tactical and practical way to improve customer service and collegiality amongst coworkers. Sticking with those routines, as Verne Harnish said, is important. If we find ways to imbue them with more inspiration and meaning, it’s all the better still. Author Anne Lamott offers,
Here’s the true secret of life: We mostly do everything over and over. In the morning, we let the dogs out, make coffee, read the paper, help whoever is around get ready for the day. We do our work. … I love ritual and repetition. Without them, I would be a balloon with a slow leak.
It's the rigor, the routine, the rhythm, and the repetition that helps hold our organizations, and our lives, together. If we stick with stuff we believe in that is beneficial, good things are likely to come from it. The Marginalian’s Maria Popova writes,
The true purpose of discipline—for this is the practice at the heart of routine—is to make room for the magical in the mundane. Paradoxically enough, it is an act of liberation rather than submission—routine grants us the stable platform within, from which we can begin not only to tolerate but perhaps even to enjoy the shaky messiness without.
My realization of recent days is, as I’ve shared above, that when we use those routines in the right way, when we engage deeply with open hearts, they have the potential to be rituals. “Managing by Pouring Water” is a routine I’ve been doing for probably 15 years now. It is, I now realize, a ritual as well. It’s certainly practical—I fill water glasses, customers get better service, and staff feel supported. But truly, it’s just as important for my own self-management. By doing it every evening, in a wonderful way, it helps me get my mental feet underneath me! When I do it, I am informed, inspired, recentered, reminded of our impact, and excited about ways we can get better.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL