Building Your Wisdom Ritual

A ritual is akin to a long keel on a sailboat that keeps it upright in strong winds. It is a compass that keeps us moving towards the goals we deem worthwhile.

A good ritual reinforces the mythos of one’s life. By mythos, I mean the guiding storyline, the direction, the goals. The most important ritual is the wisdom ritual, because it is the ritual that encourages continued growth and exploration and it is the ritual that prioritizes emotional self care. A good ritual will align your days with your weeks, your weeks with your seasons, your seasons with your years.

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I propose a set of hilltop rituals, rituals of mental digestion, rituals of mini-retreat. They occur three times a day and they can last for five to fifteen minutes each. The key is to build a ritual that is not a chore, but a small gift that we give to ourselves. It must be something that we find useful and life-affirming. However, in the beginning, any new ritual takes some effort to establish. This is why I have designed this as a six-week course, to get the ball rolling. After that point, if the general ritual has taken root in you, it will evolve and become your own.

The Evening Ritual – Digestion
It may seem strange to begin at the end of the day, but I would argue that this is the most important ritual of digestion. With apologies for over-simplicity, let’s argue that there are good days and that there are bad days. And there are some days that are a mixture of good parts and bad parts.

For the good portions of our day, we can allow this to fuel our gratitude. Gratitude is about understanding how good or bad a day in the life can be. Gratitude is born out of this perspective. This view of ‘how life works’ allows us to both accept the tough days as just a part of life and to be grateful for the good fortune that befall some of our days.

So let us be grateful for the good. To revisit the joy it provided in all its forms: the co-worker who makes us laugh, the nice conversations, the enjoyable book we are reading, the pleasant walk after work, the great meal we had with our brother, the hope felt for the future.

Next we must focus on the bad, the tough, and the challenging aspects of our day. If we climb up to that wisdom hilltop, we create some space from our immediate emotions, our reactions of distaste towards ourselves, towards others, and to that which happened on this day. Once we establish this distance, then we are free to learn, then we can transform. And if we can learn from the tough times – and these are the best teachers – well then we are well on our way to a life that we can feel proud of.

If we can receive the day with gratitude and learning each night, every day can be a rich day. And the toughest days, even if they are tough to make it through, can be embraced for their rich lessons. If a good day is made, a good week is probable, and a good life is possible.

I know it seems simple, but most wisdom is simple. It just takes practice.
The evening ritual questions to be reflected upon to be written in a notebook:
1) Was today a good day, a tough day, or something in between?
2) What made it good? What made it tough?
3) In response to the great times: ((gratitude)) what can I be grateful for before I rest?
4) In response to the tough times: ((learning)) what can I learn from today that can help me grow a bit? What were today’s challenges? How could I have responded better to today’s challenges?

Words that represent big concepts like wisdom are powerful; when they become linked with an image in our minds, the concept they represent can grow even stronger. Here is the story of the image I found to represent wisdom.

I lived for many years in Ithaca, a small city located in a valley surrounded by rolling hills covered in farmland and forests. The last few years I lived there, I spent time living close to the downtown, on the floor of the valley. On my evening strolls I would want to climb up the hills, to an overlook, to take in the town and the vastness of the setting. The problem was that to hike to the hilltops would take hours. I needed to find a hilltop close to home, amongst the flats.

It was on a snowy December evening when I first discovered my urban hilltop that would become a refuge for me for many years. I climbed to the tallest peak in the downtown, the top floor of a downtown parking garage, and from up there it was like I stepped out of my day-to-day life and communed with the skies and the town on a different level.

Up there, I was a bit removed from myself; it is like I would step into a different mindset, a different persona. I would observe myself, but I would observe myself from a distance, as one of the many living in the village below this hilltop. The snowy nights up there were the most poignant, because the scene was so quiet, nearly absent of sound. Looking down the seven stories, I could see all the impressions of those that had crossed by this street in the past few hours – the paths of footsteps, the tracks from bike tires and strollers and cars. The quiet and the absence of activity at this late night hour, juxtaposed with so many steps and tracks left behind seemed to inspire a level of reflection and quietude that I had sought for some time.
From this vantage, I just felt a level of calm.

Was that part of wisdom - a calmness, a contentment? Up there on the rooftop, did I forget about myself a bit and instead focus on my common human-ness? And I do not mean to speak down to my common human-ness, I mean to celebrate it. This common-ness, our uniquely flavored but inherently common joys and struggles, this is what made us human. This is what I mean by our common human-ness.

These hilltop rituals were mostly about stepping back, stepping out of my life. But what was going on in these moments? My conversations with myself would sound something like this:
Was today a good day? No, today was miserable. I felt stressed about this coming move. I felt lonely. I felt lost in life. Well, can I learn from today’s challenges? For if I can learn from the tough times, am I not doing the ultimate daily alchemy, transforming tough days into the greatest teachers of all?

Up there on this urban hilltop, I could reflect, I could be thankful for the day in its entirety, I could feel refreshed and optimistic for tomorrow and I could walk home and sleep well.

My ritual was coming together.

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Perhaps a ritual of reflection can be viewed as a ritual of digestion. And we need to step away in order to digest properly. And in today’s world of computers in our pockets, we can choose to never really digest our days; and this is why we have to make it a ritual. We have to prioritize it or it will never happen.

We come to some peace with the chaos not from trying to control it all, but by stepping back to a calm place and being all right with it all. By seeing clearly what we can influence, what we can control – our efforts, and our response to what the world offers today – and also seeing and accepting all that is out of control.