Rituals are not for me

I keep participating in the IndieWeb Carnival , because the themes proposed by the nice people hosting it each month often push me out of my comfort zone. They make me think about myself, my present and my past.
More often than not, they make me realise that, through the years, I have dried off.

I have fewer feelings, fewer aspirations, fewer sources of enthusiasm.
I haven’t embraced minimalism yet, but I do enjoy simplicity in architecture and design.
It’s age, it’s maybe experience, even disillusionment.
It doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Maybe with time the things that seem important - the things that are important - change.

This dryness applies to everyday life too.
I need discussions, posts, activities, to get to the point. I have become allergic to people using a million words to talk about nothing.
I no longer find value in huge mystery boxes you have to unwrap for ages before their content is revealed.
And I see no point in complicating simple routine activities.

This means that rituals are not for me. Not anymore.
It’s true for the big public ones: I left religion behind decades ago. No more Sunday Mass, no more prayers, no more rites, no more Catholic rituals.
And it’s also valid for personal routines: at some point, even not long ago, I would have told you how the process of preparing coffee in the morning was a sort of sacred Italian ritual. Today, I just want my espresso preparation to be as express as possible.

That doesn’t mean I am against people having personal rituals: they express care and attention; they bring joy through small gestures; they can enrich the enjoyment of life. And they make great shared experiences .
But I’m not in that space anymore ¹.

This post is my submission for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival , hosted by Steve on Tangible Life . The theme is Rituals.