… and blues

Mention rituals — capital R Rituals — and most folks think of chants, robes, candles and scented smoke. Dead languages, maybe, or at least peculiar usages, phrasing and vocabulary.

Beads, rattles, drums, chimes and bells. Shamans, healers, mystics, seers … or some sort of clergy, anyway.

Ancient history that may or may not be relevant today.

Capital R stuff.

And it’s easy to see how, in a super-interconnected electronified world, the buzzy repetition of a mantra might not compare well with flossing in Fortnite.

What’s eluding notice, though, is how many small-R rituals we’ve begun to develop over and above the ones we’ve always had.

Let’s start with those, the ones we’ve always had.

Rituals, which give our lives their rhythm and organization, stop being noticed as we integrate them, the same way we stop thinking about pedals and merely drive our cars. The rituals are automatic, or damned near.

Yes, if we get overly ritualized, we can be judged obsessive, but as long as we can defy rituals’ control from time to time, we’re fine.

Sock-sock-shoe-shoe or sock-shoe-sock-shoe? Left first, or right? Shirt then pants, or pants first? Floss-brush or brush-floss-gargle?

The correct answer is always whatever’s right for us.

The list goes on for each of us. On and on and on. Mundane things, though important in themselves.

The lists comprise our unique comfort zones.

And all would be well if hypno-technology hadn’t started interfering.

For longer than I can calculate, my daily routine, my morning and evening and nighttime rituals included checking my email and other related posts and missives. Desktop, laptop and mobile. If there were fewer than 100 messages in a batch, I felt cheated. More than 400 — not often but far from rare — and I stressed.

Like Capital R Rituals, these rituals took on mythic proportions, assumed significance that, viewed objectively, they did not deserve the way true Capital Rs do.

Thus, when I lost two company email accounts and access to a myriad of networks, and surrendered my second phone, I went through withdrawal. Fellow travelers in the land of unexpected retirement told me similar stories. And all of us confess to seeking some sort of replacement activity.

Like the frog being boiled in water that was slowly heated around it, we’ve been surrendering to this for decades. Asimov and Heinlein hinted at it in short stories and novels. Rod Serling routinely used the tool that was addicting us to warn us about the tool that was addicting us. Marie Winn wrote “The Plug-In Drug” in 1977 and could document then how electrons and phosphors and scanning lines on snowy screens could hold us in thrall.

Our screens are not going away. Our need for rituals is hard-wired into our human psyches, so that’s definitely not going away.

What is fading? Our ability to control the rhythms of our days, the places where we use rituals to regulate and comfort, and not to be controlled by a stressful overlord.

I guess sometimes you do have to think about what pedals to step on.