Observing rituals and routines can be good for reducing stress.

Observing rituals and routines can be good for everything from reducing stress and strengthening familial and social connections, to achieving a personal sense of progress and accomplishment. In these challenging times, they are more important than ever.

We love rhythm. From Cardi B to Beethoven, music plucks an orchestra of emotions located deep within our beings. Remember the old days when we handed over cold hard cash for a CD so we could play the same songs over and over? (I’m guilty of buying the same Radiohead disc twice because I loved it so much.) Our inner instruments itch to harmonise with the music others make, again and again. Every culture on every continent in every century has had its own way of making rhythms that can pluck heart strings and make toes tap, and in so doing connect people to each other.

Animals, too, pulse with rhythm. Tickle a cat and sure enough, it will purr. Meet the sunrise and listen for a sparrow’s song. Venture out almost anywhere during a summer dusk and have your ears filled with the raucous chirping of cicadas. Beyond their need for food and shelter, the animal kingdom is just like us – hard-wired with hunger for a regular beat.

Nature’s calls and music are just the start. They are the acoustic analogy of a broader and deeper affiliation we living beings have with rhythm. Our bodies seek and do it everywhere. We dance, we thrum the table with anxious fingers awaiting news of a loved one, clap our hands in rapt applause during encores, rub our children’s sore tummies in even circles … You name it, we do it to a beat. Our internal metronomes set the measure for every occasion, whether it’s the most satisfying frequency for rocking in a hammock or the most relaxing ratio of inhalation to exhalation in pranayama.

SHARED RITUALS

This metronome extends to more than just what we do with our limbs and lungs. Playing out over our lifetime is a rhythm of rituals. We structure our years into a pattern. It might be religious – Christmas, Ramadan and Passover, when followers unite the world over to mark these important events – or secular, with birthday and anniversary celebrations as well as special days to remember those who have passed.

The calendar year is a music sheet onto which we score the notes of meaningful days. There’s a tempo to it.

I was never one for marking my birthday, and I’m not particularly religious, but years ago I met a woman

with hazel eyes who said that these things are important because they connect us to our loved ones and with our tribes. Not only human-prescribed days deserve respect, she said, but nature’s rhythm, too. Buy fruit only in season, was her philosophy, otherwise we’d miss out on the sweet anticipation of biting into a summer blood plum or of splitting open a winter mandarin. Sure, she could find a pineapple in autumn or pears in spring, but where’s the joy in that? The produce loses its seasonal specialness, its ability to connect us to something bigger than ourselves – the arc of the Earth around the Sun. Like Sunday night movies (remember those?) or a long-distance romance, waiting sharpens the appetite. Nature has a beat, she whispered, and we should listen to it.

Everyday rituals sew a rhythm, too. They are the pauses in a mundane day, the punctuation in life’s sentences. They give us breathing space. One of my favourites was the bedtime story. Every night we’d read our kids books such as The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Tucked up in bed, they’d shiver in anticipation as we turned the pages until their eyelids grew heavy and they eventually drifted off. By the way, what better example is there of the journey being more important than the destination than watching a child react to the same story over and over again no matter whether it’s in a book, on TV, or in a song lyric? (It’s the same with adults, too – even after innumerable listenings, I still tear up at Ed Sheeran and Andrea Bocelli’s Perfect Symphony.) The rhythm of the bedtime ritual embodies our yearning for the familiar, the known, the linking of one event (slumber) with another (a caterpillar story).

Even seemingly meaningless rituals can be important. Empty the dishwasher, make breakfasts, prepare school lunches – it used to be the triple beat of my mornings. How routine, you might say, and at the time I’d have nodded my head in furious agreement.

Then, with lockdown, came a newfound stillness to the mornings and I loved it.

But little by little a strange thing happened: I began to miss the dawn ritual of kids yawning their way into the kitchen, cinnamon wafting up from porridge, the debate over whether it’s going to be a salad or a sandwich day. So, when the schools reopened, I sighed a long ‘thank you’ – not just because they were finally back in class, but because I had my morning routine back. And, like all rituals, it brought with it the anticipation of something familiar and then the satisfaction of a task completed, since no matter how big or small, crossing a task off a list is immensely satisfying.

Lockdown brought many such moments into sharp relief. What I used to think was mundane and ho-hum turned out to be kind of special. Not just the mornings, but the schlepping to and from soccer practice, the party pick-ups, catching a bus, market shopping with the kids (‘no sweetheart, we’re not buying the $15, vegan, organic ice cream’). And I really, really missed the ordinary, routine night out at our local hole-in-the-wall with friends.

NEW RITUALS

In my otherwise monotonous, housebound existence, I created a structure. Before Zooming for the day, I’d share toast and tea in bed with my wife and we’d listen to the singing of birds that either we had been too busy to notice before, or it had been too noisy to hear. Late afternoons I’d fill with the homemaintenance jobs I’d been putting off since the turn of the century (and wow, were they satisfying to cross off my list). My regular Saturday breakfasts with Dr Fabulous had to change to beach walks because of the café restrictions.

Many of these and other COVID rituals I’m going to try to maintain. We are not out of the woods yet, but the hard lockdown is over, a vaccine is on the horizon, and the sun is shining. It’s glorious. I’ve returned from the market with my daughter lugging a bag of bright, red, blood plums and I’ve got three hours to seal the cracks in the lane wall before we head out for dinner with some friends.

I go to the bookshelf to put on some music and what do I see but two identical Radiohead CDs. Years ago, I gave the second copy to a woman who told me I should follow the seasons. Now, hers and mine lie next to each other just like their owners do, having tea and toast and listening to the birds sing in the morning.

“THESE THINGS LINK US TO OUR LOVED ONES AND OUR TRIBES.”