A Reflection on a Life Reset, Ritual Renewal, and Transition Time

About a decade ago, I started graduate school. I am that old. Back then, I bought a tablet a few days before my first class. It was the first Apple device that I could afford that was not a phone or an iPod. Five years later, I bought my first e-ink tablet before starting my postdoctoral research position. Now, at another transition point, I have been considering a different device. But, perhaps with age and more life experience, I am tired of being sold new starts.

Though I am not in the market for buying beginnings (or the promise of them), I am still making some changes in my life, as is necessary when situations change. Here is one method I am using to start again for free.

Renewing Rituals

I think most of us feel like we could use an extra hour or two. Time is often marketed to us. To grow away from this marketing hook, I am redesigning my life by rescheduling and re-ritualizing my days.

I like to build daily, weekly, and monthly rhythms. My best days start in the early mornings with some combination of journaling, writing, and running. Readers of my writing will already know that this trio is my morning ritual, every morning possible.

To renew a ritual, I evaluate it and try to investigate how to improve it. After returning from a conference in mid-June, I realized I was missing a critical period in my ritual, and that missing period was the reason I felt rushed. I needed transition time.

I am not the kind of person who thrives with jolting change. I need a bit of margin, and I am learning to self-accommodate, to schedule in that time for myself. I sometimes schedule my days in blocks of time, but grace periods help me feel calm. I need stretches when I have nothing to do and nowhere to be, whether it’s five minutes, fifty minutes, or five hours (e.g., on my obligatory day off: Sunday). Time blocking should always include transition time if the goal is to maintain calm throughout the day.

How much time we may need to transition from task to task is an individual decision. It varies from person to person and within-person, depending on the circumstance. We can learn more about our individual needs through deliberate reflection. Though a ritual might be shifted during any day, Sundays are when I have the most time to reflect. Most Sundays, I review and archive my physical notes and integrate the useful bits into digital systems. Then, I think through any steps that may need reworking or changing based on my review of the week. These notes represent my thought patterns, which guide the way I structure my days and the pieces that I write.

Ritual Examples

My writing is developing into a monthly cycle. An ideal writing progression for me flows from week to week. The first week of each month, I share something that I’ve focused on from the month(s) prior. The second week of the month, I draft something new, slowly, allowing myself to transition toward a new perspective. The third week, I try to finish the draft and start to edit. The fourth week, I revise. Then, the first full week of the new month, I share. This step completes the writing cycle, and completing writing cycles is becoming more and more important to my progress and personal growth, as these small projects help me move forward with my larger, longer-form works.

To guide myself forward, I have to forge calm in my life. I design my mornings for consistent moments of calm. My ideal morning looks like this: light incense, brew rooibos tea, sit with a thread-bound notebook to fold in half and sort the noise in my head into clear signal to write and type, and then, run with the sunrise. These types of mornings, with this bounty of simple luxury, are rare, to be honest with you. But they are special when I am able to make them happen.

A reminder to myself in my tiny binder that reads: yes, i can start again whenever i need to

In practice, I am focusing on minimal days that touch on the major waypoints of my ideal morning ritual. Each day, at minimum for me, should involve reflection, communication, and movement. The intention of my journal is reflection; writing is to organize my thinking and communicate clearly; and running is for movement. These are some of the daily practices that make the most sense for my life, but my world would not fall apart if they needed to change, and knowing that, gripping the habitual a little more loosely, is freeing. The best thing about this: modifying the ritual is free.