Michael Puett, Professor of Chinese History, Harvard University
From "Why Do People Perform Ritual?"
What rituals do is they force you for a brief moment to become a different person and interact with those around you in a different way. So for that brief moment suddenly you’re no longer repeating the same old patterns, you’re doing something else and what they argued was: it’s that break that really matters.
Let me give you an absurdly mundane example. Typical in America is when we see someone that we sort of know and...we’re going through the usual day, our anxieties, fears, angers, blah, blah, blah...And then we see someone and we say, "Oh hey, how's it going?" And the other person goes, "Oh, pretty good. How are you?" And we say, "Oh year, I pretty good too." Then we walk off.
Now if you think about it, you might think it’s sort of silly that we do that because that’s inauthentic....But if you think of it as a ritual, it’s actually a very good thing to do and we should even do it more fully.
Because what you’re doing is breaking out of that standard set of patterns of the ways you going about the day. For that brief moment...you enter a ritual space. You’re connecting with someone. Things are going well. You’re connecting with this person perfectly. It breaks you out of those patterns. If you’re doing that sort of thing, these little seemingly meaningless rituals consistently over the course of a day, you’re breaking yourself out of these little patterns and opening up other possibilities.
That is why ritual matters. It breaks us out of patterns. We enter it into as a space. We act as if we are a different person with a different set of emotions interacting with those around us in a different way and that is, over time, how you break these patterns.
From "Why Do People Perform Ritual?"
What rituals do is they force you for a brief moment to become a different person and interact with those around you in a different way. So for that brief moment suddenly you’re no longer repeating the same old patterns, you’re doing something else and what they argued was: it’s that break that really matters.
Let me give you an absurdly mundane example. Typical in America is when we see someone that we sort of know and...we’re going through the usual day, our anxieties, fears, angers, blah, blah, blah...And then we see someone and we say, "Oh hey, how's it going?" And the other person goes, "Oh, pretty good. How are you?" And we say, "Oh year, I pretty good too." Then we walk off.
Now if you think about it, you might think it’s sort of silly that we do that because that’s inauthentic....But if you think of it as a ritual, it’s actually a very good thing to do and we should even do it more fully.
Because what you’re doing is breaking out of that standard set of patterns of the ways you going about the day. For that brief moment...you enter a ritual space. You’re connecting with someone. Things are going well. You’re connecting with this person perfectly. It breaks you out of those patterns. If you’re doing that sort of thing, these little seemingly meaningless rituals consistently over the course of a day, you’re breaking yourself out of these little patterns and opening up other possibilities.
That is why ritual matters. It breaks us out of patterns. We enter it into as a space. We act as if we are a different person with a different set of emotions interacting with those around us in a different way and that is, over time, how you break these patterns.