Meaningful Habits

This morning I got to thinking about rituals, routines and habits.

This is some information I found from the internet:

The difference between a routine and a ritual is not necessarily the action, but the attitude behind the action. To many, a routine is getting up every morning, eating breakfast, brushing your teeth, taking a shower, getting dressed, and going to work. … However, rituals are viewed as more meaningful practices.

A habit is an action we do often in a regular and repeated way. Routine is a regular way of doing things in a particular order. The main difference between habit and routine is that habit is a recurrent with little or no conscious thought whereas routine require a high degree of intention and effort.

I’m still a little confused.  I guess it is just a matter of degrees.  I got to thinking about all of this because my husband is on a business trip.  Because of this, our morning routines/rituals and our evening routines/rituals are shook up a little bit.

Our typical morning “routine” consists of my husband going to the gym freakishly early.  (He can have that part of the routine all to himself.)  When he arrives home from the gym, I saunter out to the kitchen, where our two youngest children are eating breakfast, gathering their stuff to head to school and either stressing about upcoming tests or joking about upcoming events, depending on the schedule.  I take out and feed our dogs and when I come back inside my husband has poured my coffee into one of our many mugs.  I like to think that he chooses “the mug of the day” deliberately and carefully as all of our mugs have some meaning to us.  We have collected them from vacations, our college, our children’s college, and sometimes just from quirky impulsive shopping days.  I recently purchased a mug that says, “T.J. Maxx is my spirit animal” on one of those more impulsive shopping excursions.

After kissing the kids and sending them on their way, we saunter back to our bedroom, where I read The Daily Skimm, some headline stories and our horoscopes to my husband while he gets ready for work.  After he leaves, I head out to my desk to start writing my blog.

I suppose that is just our morning “routine”, but considering how much I miss it when he is gone, I see it more as our morning “ritual.”  I have my own “rituals” when he is out of town, too.  Last night, we had Chick-Fil-A for dinner.  This meal is almost a given when my husband is out of town.  My kids put in their orders without even asking me “What’s for dinner?”  I also just reserved on Redbox a strange, indie documentary film for me to watch tonight.  I’m greatly looking forward to it and I am sure that my husband is relieved to not have to watch it with me.  We watch more traditional films when we are together, so I save my more “out of the box” film choices for when he is traveling.

Every year and every season our routines change a little bit.  I guess when what we do during a new routine becomes habitual, it becomes more meaningful to us.  When our habits and routines become more meaningful we see them more as “ritual”, almost becoming sacred to us.  I imagine if we really examined our everyday routines, our holiday traditions, our vacation and trip plans, etc. we would see just how much habit/routine/ritual plays into the big picture.  We usually don’t notice this, until a change-up occurs or when something unusual disrupts the flow, but it is really true that we are creatures of habit.  I think that the examining of our habits/routines/rituals is a smart thing to do, though.  Perhaps some things are just habits and perhaps they aren’t particularly meaningful or helpful or even healthy for us anymore.  Maybe little tweaks here and there to our every day practices could start a ripple effect, allowing even more creativity and excitement and anticipation to enter into our every day lives.  And at the very least, by examining the actions that have become like rituals to us, we can be thankful for all of the real meaning and comfort that we do have in our daily lives without even realizing it.