Life as Sacred Ritual

 

Life as Sacred Ritual

Everything we do is ritual. Many of these acts have been performed countless times before us, by others. We repeat the same cycles, knowingly or unknowingly. What, then, is truly new? New to the individual. New to our shared human story. We soon realise that there is very little we can do that has not already been done by someone somewhere. But this does not make it irrelevant for us to experience something new ourselves.

You cannot truly know what a place is like until you have stood there. You cannot know what a book is until you have read it yourself. Reading a summary, or watching the film adaptation, is not the same at all.

When an artist practices, they repeat the same tasks over and over, refining through trial and error until skill emerges—and after many years, mastery. The novice cannot know in advance how many years it will take to become a master. But if life grants us time, we each have the possibility of mastery in something.

This happens, often unnoticed, in the daily rituals of living. Someone who cares about health and refuses to live on ready meals learns to cook. After decades, and many experiments, they become skilled—especially if they began with curiosity. After having baked five hundred loaves of bread (or perhaps fewer), they no longer need to measure the ingredients precisely. Some recipes become flexible, shaped by feel rather than by numbers.

You learn, for example, that onions shallow-fried will soften but not crisp at a certain temperature after a certain time—something you can sense by smell alone. You learn to tell when bread in the oven is ready, not by the timer but by its aroma. And beyond such practical skills, we develop a subtler instinct: the art of attunement.

Guided by intuition, we discover that the more we trust it, the more it guides us rightly. When we resist it, life becomes heavier, more complicated. When we follow our hunches—like bending to pick up some object we might otherwise ignore—only to find later it is exactly what a friend needs at a crucial moment, we see the thread. The instinct may not make logical sense, but it perceives connections beyond our conscious sight.

How do we judge a potential partner? Logic might list their virtues: attractiveness, wealth, convenience. But none of it matters if intuition does not say: yes, this is the one.

The universe itself is holistic, alive with movements of energy, invisible threads beyond our awareness—or only dimly sensed. Intuition is our direct link to the subconscious, the divine, the greater weave of all things. When something feels right, it often is right, even if our rational mind argues otherwise.

And so, through repetition, practice, and trust, life itself becomes a sacred ritual: each act, each choice, each gesture—an offering and a discovery at once.