I Am Not Sure Any of This Counts as a Ritual

At a dinner in July someone asked me what my morning ritual was. I heard myself answer: I stand near a window and drink coffee. There was a short pause afterwards where I could hear how little I had said, and how much the question had been expecting.

What the word promises

Ritual implies the actions point at something past themselves. A candle at a table is not for light. That is the whole reason the word exists, to separate acts that carry meaning from acts that produce results. Measured against that, most of what I do in the morning is disappointingly literal. Boiling water is for coffee. Coffee is for caffeine and because I like the taste. Standing up rather than sitting is because my chair faces the wrong way. There is no gesture in any of it that would still make sense if you removed its function.

The test I applied

Repetition on its own is clearly not enough, or everything I do twice would qualify. I brush my teeth in the same order every night and nobody has ever asked me about my evening ritual, because the order is arbitrary and produces nothing but clean teeth in a fixed sequence. Doing something the same way for four years makes it a habit. Something else has to happen for it to become the other thing.

So the test I settled on was: is there any part I would keep if it had no practical function at all. Most of the sequence failed immediately. The kettle failed. The grinder failed. The specific cup failed, and I checked that one by using a different cup for a fortnight and feeling nothing.

Two parts were harder to score. The order of the sequence has no justification I can defend and I keep it anyway, which looks suspicious under this test. I think that is a comfort with a familiar order rather than meaning, in the same category as walking the same route to the same shop when a shorter one exists. The other is that I do not read during the first cup, although I want to and nothing prevents it. That one I still cannot classify, and it has been four years.

The one part that might qualify

In February I open the kitchen window for four minutes at minus something, in a flat that is not stuffy, having cooked nothing the night before. There is no ventilation argument available. It makes the room cold and I have to stand there with a jumper over my pyjamas holding a hot cup with both hands.

I do it because the room needs to have outside in it before I can start. That is not a functional reason and I cannot restate it in functional terms without it becoming false. If any part of this is a ritual, it is that part, and it is worth noticing that it is also the part I would have left out of a description if I were trying to make my mornings sound appealing.

Why the word matters to me at all

Because ritual is the word this material gets sold with, and once a sequence is a ritual it starts requiring objects. The right cup, the right cloth, the right grinder, the right small ceramic thing to put the spoon on. I own a cheap burr grinder that came with an unwelcome noise, and a cup with a chip on the handle side that I keep turned away from me, and after four years I can say with some confidence that neither has made a measurable difference to how the mornings go. Calling the sequence a ritual quietly invites a shopping list, and I would rather not be a person who supplies one.

What I would call it instead

The phrase I keep coming back to is the shape of the first hour, which is clumsy and would not fit on anything. A habit with a view is closer to how it feels and slightly too pleased with itself. Mostly it is a thing I do that has become the thing I do, and the accuracy of that sentence is exactly proportional to how boring it is.

The counter-argument I cannot dismiss

Here is what stops me closing the case. Four years of the same forty minutes, including a winter when it stopped entirely and a spring when someone else was at the table, does seem to accumulate into something that is not only a sequence. When I do a rough version of it in a hotel room with bad instant coffee and a window that opens four centimetres, it is still recognisably the same act. That suggests the meaning is not in the coffee or the window or the flat, which is roughly what people mean when they call something a ritual.

The dinner conversation showed me one other thing, which is that the word does real social work. Ritual is answerable. The shape of the first hour invites nothing back, and the person asking was being friendly rather than conducting an audit.

So possibly. What I am fairly sure of is that whatever meaning is there attached itself backwards, over years, without being installed on purpose, and that it did not arrive because I decided to be the sort of person who has a morning ritual. I would rather leave the question open than upgrade my kitchen habits into a practice for the sake of a better sentence. Standing near a window drinking coffee is what I have. It has held up under conditions that would have embarrassed a stronger claim.