Why are rituals?
An idle thought that occurred while eating a sandwich.
I live in Toronto and, for both family and work reasons, I travel frequently. These travels usually take me through the Toronto Pearson International Airport. Since I am not a Canadian citizen, immigration is a little bit rattling even if I know that everything I’ve ever done is by the book. Once I’m through immigration, while I’m waiting for my luggage1, I play the song We’re Finally Landing by HOME on my Bluetooth earphones. Then I walk past customs, out into arrivals, and immediately turn right and take the first escalator up, where one can find a Subway. There, I order a footlong sandwich—or a six inch …
Why are rituals?
An idle thought that occurred while eating a sandwich.
I live in Toronto and, for both family and work reasons, I travel frequently. These travels usually take me through the Toronto Pearson International Airport. Since I am not a Canadian citizen, immigration is a little bit rattling even if I know that everything I’ve ever done is by the book. Once I’m through immigration, while I’m waiting for my luggage1, I play the song We’re Finally Landing by HOME on my Bluetooth earphones. Then I walk past customs, out into arrivals, and immediately turn right and take the first escalator up, where one can find a Subway. There, I order a footlong sandwich—or a six inch if I’m not that hungry—and eat it before going home.
Why do I always do this? I’ve been doing the song ever since I first came to Canada in 2019, and the Subway since the first time I returned to Canada in 2022. It’s a ritual, but why do I perform this ritual so religiously? Why does anyone perform rituals?
Wiktionary says it’s usually for religious reasons2. I even described my practicing of the ritual as “religious” a few words ago. But I’m not religious, or even particularly spiritual. Even if I were, anything that I might want to pray about has already passed. I’ve once again survived both the things I might worry about while traveling—riding in an airplane, and going through immigration in a foreign country3. At this point I’m home free, quite literally. If anything, it’s kinda celebratory. But in that case you might think that I’d switch it up. Go to Burger King instead, or listen to some other song that I picked up from a famous YouTuber. But I don’t. It’s gotta be Subway and it’s gotta be We’re Finally Landing.
Religious people are also very particular about their rituals. The reason I was out of Canada this time was to celebrate my uncle’s 50th birthday and Diwali with my family. On Diwali, my family does a puja, a Hindu ritual where we pray to (in this case) Goddess Lakshmi so that (in this case) we get peace and prosperity. Every year, since I’ve been a kid, we’ve sang the same hymns, done the same aarti4, lit the same diyas5, and had the same sweets afterwards. I celebrated Diwali with my family after six years of being away from them during Diwali time, and after all these years, the ceremony was identical.
The other ceremony that I attended that’s always identical is a birthday celebration. Everyone gathers around the birthday-person with a cake—always a cake—sticks candles into the cake—always into the cake, never next to it so that it might not leak wax all over the cake you’re about to eat—and then the birthday-person blows out all the candles and then you sing the same congratulatory hymn. Birthdays aren’t particularly religious occasions, and yet we seem pretty set in our ways in how to celebrate them.
Ever since I’ve become a grownup who pays rent and washes their clothes and stuff, life has been one unexpected thing after another. Never a moment to rest, never a moment to let your guard down. My parents say the same thing, my friends say the same thing. But eliminating things to do is also not the answer. The term “bedrotting” has negative connotations for a reason—it feels bad to not be productive, to feel like life is passing you by and you’re just laying waste to the limited time you have alive.
Hence, I believe, the ritual. You’re going to do something, because you gotta do things. You know exactly what you’re going to do, because it’s always been one unexpected thing after the next, so it’s refreshing to, for once, know exactly what’s going to come up ahead. You know you must do things this way because you’ve always done them this way. There’s comfort in a little bit of foresight even if it’s only a repetition of the past, a little bit of purpose even if it’s only for its own sake. You don’t need to worry about what to do, you can just go ahead and do it.
or walking past all the suckers who have to wait for their luggage ↩︎ 1.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ritual ↩︎ 1.
Objectively, both of these things have been pretty safe for me. But fear is a powerful thing, even if you know that it’s unjustified. ↩︎ 1.
A sub-ceremony where you rotate a lamp in front of a deity an odd number of times (in this case, 3) to venerate them. ↩︎ 1.
oil lamps ↩︎