Living a more simple life gives you the opportunity to figure out why you move through a day. What is a day for? What should you use an entire day for? How do we best receive the gifts any particular day may hold for us?

A “day” as a unit of meaning gets lost in these modern times of ongoing, complicated projects, communications measured in nano-seconds, bad news beaming in from all over a world that is currently at a different point of its day than we are, and lights on and shopping going 24 hours a day. What are our life goals? Does one day really have much value in relation to those goals?

Yes. A cycle of a day is a basic unit of meaning and functioning built into us by Nature. To ignore it or try to re-shape it into a unit of a different size (the project unit, say, in which time is mostly measured by the beginning and ending of an intense project or the slide on by until the weekend unit which is a life of weekends interrupted by boring bumps in between) robs us of health, well-being and opportunities.

Once we become aware of having the highest life goals and then gradually become willing to mold our lives in such a way that gives us hope of achieving the highest life goals, then “a day” becomes a unit of meaning and of practice of great significance. Creating new habits, for instance, is “a day at a time” venture by definition and is one of our most powerful tools as human beings for making something of ourselves. Given that we have generally managed to make ourselves into creatures rife with bad habits that take us away from anything real, learning the mechanics of transforming positive intentions into actual habits is a life changing necessity. Lots of people have lots to say on this subject. Here is a useful list of 18 Tricks to Make New Habits Stick. This author’s tricks include:

Commit to 30 Days

Make it Daily

Form a Trigger

Replace Lost Needs

Use ‘But’

Associate with Role Models

Know the Benefits

This is a good article to add to our understanding of how to form habits. There are short explanations for each of the 18 tricks and some of the tricks I have never heard of.

Moving from habits to rituals, the same author just wrote another related article on the same web site entitled The Power of Ritual: Conquer Procrastination, Time Wasters and Laziness. (Lifehack.org is a very popular and oft quoted blog with frequently updated posts covering myriad ways to increase productivity and organization in life.) He makes the following apt observation:

Life is wasted in the in-between times. The time between when your alarm first rings and when you finally decide to get out of bed. The time between when you sit at your desk and when productive work begins. The time between making a decision and doing something about it. Slowly your day is whittled away from all the unused in-between moments.

The solution to reclaim these lost middle moments is by creating rituals. Every culture on earth uses rituals to transfer information and encode behaviors that are deemed important. Personal rituals can help you build a better pattern for handling everything from how you wake up to how you work.

Unfortunately, when most people see rituals, they see pointless superstitions. Indeed, many rituals are based on a primitive understanding of the world. But by building personal rituals, you get to encode the behaviors you feel are important and cut out the wasted middle moments.

In other words, here rituals are a connected series of habits designed to bring more efficiency to our days without our having to think about it all the time. They are problem solvers one generation up from mere habits. Scott Young, the author, goes on to describe some of his successful rituals covering waking up, web usage, friendliness, working, exercise, sleeping and so on. He also gives some tips for forming successful rituals.

I am not crazy about the word ritual because it often implies a thoughtless carrying out of an action that would otherwise be meaningful if done in full consciousness. His strategies are good and usefully filling idle moments or moments that otherwise slip away from us is excellent. I am constantly searching for hidden pockets of time in my day. Occasionally I find one or two and develop a new habit for that newly discovered little pocket of time.

However, I think the next generation of problem solvers up from rituals is rhythm. A higher goal to reach calls for a deeper response from us. If our goal were to shift from the efficient use of time to uncovering a natural life, for instance, how might our days change? If we were to choose as a goal to consecrate every word and action to Him, would rituals per se suit us any longer? I don’t think so. I think that when we move on to simpler ways of life that spring from a heartfelt desire to focus on Him (or whatever word or idea you want to use to represent the highest and subtlest), each day becomes a significant pearl to be handled with care.

It is perhaps a rhythmic movement through our days that brings us the greatest sense of well-being. Rhythms come from nature whereas rituals are man-made. Each day, after all, is itself made of a rhythm of light and sound and atmosphere all playing together to provide living things with the beat for breathing Him in and breathing Him out. By discovering our inner rhythms in light of our highest goals, we can elevate our approach to our days from a search for efficiency to a search for simple sacredness. By working with nature to construct the details of our lives, we can move from a fragmented approach to one that is deeply holistic. By giving the deepest meaning possible to our use of time, we can find ways to move through our appointed days that accomplishes what needs to be accomplished but in full consciousness.

Each day can then be savored for the blessed opportunity that it is. Each day can then not only be full but also fragrant.

From the beautiful mountains of southwest Virginia,

Leslie

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