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When we think about our relationship to time, ritualizing our relationship helps us to slow down and notice it – be it hours, days, weeks, seasons, years…or something more personal. In the opportunities we have to mark time, we can see the patterns and recognize we belong to them, Michael Norton calls this humanizing time. He shows how rituals—whether lighting a candle at dusk or singing the same lullaby each night, or the way we mark our anniversaries, eat a brownie to mark the end of the school week, or begin a new day, week, month or year – these transform time from something we measure into something we feel.
Rituals give shape to the shapeless. They turn ordinary moments into emotional architecture.
In the end, time is not just what passes, it’s what we choose to notice; It’s how we choose to remember. And through ritual, we don’t just mark time—we make it meaningful.
Contribute your own experience below:
- How do you experience the passage of time emotionally—does it feel fast, slow, cyclical, linear—and what helps you feel more present within it? What unit of time feels most meaningful for you to mark?
- What seasonal moment—solstice, equinox, first snowfall, blooming of spring—feels most meaningful to you, and why?
- How have you inherited how you celebrate birthdays versus how you’d rather honour your next marking of your annual trip around the sun?
- If you were to create a seasonal or time-marking ritual for your community, what would it look like? What elements—food, nature, storytelling, silence—would you include?
Hi Chris, this is Madeline from Los Angeles. I’ve been attending every week since before Covid…I was introduced to SSUC by Nancy whom I met in a Caroline McDade singing group down here. I just want to tell you how much I appreciate your reveries and soliloquies each week and hope for a time when some handy tech person figures out how to put those up on YouTube…I’d so like to send and post just those reflections of yours to social media platforms and special people who would find them as meaningful as do I.
I have meaningful rituals of my own in the morning, evening, bedtime, etc. One includes this poem by Wm. Blake: “To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wildflower; Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.”