by Lei Wang
It’s my birthday twice a month, every month. Or at least I treat each 13th and 27th as if it were my birthday. I don’t ask anyone else to pretend with me; I keep to the usual annual celebratory imposition. It is an internal orientation.
From morning to night on the 13th and 27th of the month (because I was born on a 13th and like odd numbers), I feel the day is special. I can do whatever I want. Technically, as a writer and freelance worker, I can pretty much always do what I want, but external circumstances don’t always match internal understandings. And the ability to always do what I want is also the pressure to be always working, no real evenings or weekends, because I can (though mostly because I’ve procrastinated during the day). How much work is enough when you work for yourself, when you are supposedly doing the work you love? Even resident doctors get two days off a month, to save their own lives. And so: my self-made fortnightly ritual.
What I always want to do is lounge around but on my “birthday,” I can lounge without an ounce of guilt. I may still choose to write a bit, but then I feel extraordinarily virtuous—to be working on my birthday! (Yes, my birthday is secretly a productivity hack.) I get the fancier chocolate at the grocery store which I may have justified on another day, but today, I don’t even have to justify. I light the jasmine-bergamot candle I have been hoarding. I am magnanimous with myself. Whatever I do, there is a rare sense of permissiveness that even real birthdays don’t have: there is some pressure to revel on actual birthdays, and the potential for disappointment, while on private birthdays I can do anything I want which includes nothing at all.
Perhaps I even need to work—probably, in fact, I have not quite planned my time well and unlike Jesus’ birthday or the birthdays of nations, my fake birthdays necessarily fall on random, inconvenient days. But even working, I think, just for today, I don’t have to be perfect. It’s my birthday. And there is a special pleasure in a random Tuesday no longer being random, just because I imagined it so.
Self-help books seem to imply that this special pleasure can be had everyday, if you are just grateful enough: the ordinary daily turned extraordinary. And I do suspect there is truth there, because this capacity for transformation is possible: it is the same as to pretend on days that are no different from other days that they are special, which is what holidays are on a collective level. What humans do: not just attach meaning to things, but actively make them.
The New York Times Magazine’s latest special issue, on Happiness, differentiates between two kinds of happiness: hedonic happiness and eudaemonic happiness. Hedonic happiness is the happiness of simple pleasures, and eudaemonic happiness is the happiness of meaningful joy. “For hedonic well-being, think of eating a mind-blowing cookie, laughing at a funny social media post, or lounging by a fireplace during a snowstorm,” the editors write. “Eudaemonic well-being, meanwhile, refers to the deeper sense of meaning and purpose that can come from, say, feeling a sense of mastery over challenging work, volunteering in your community and bonding with loved ones.” Everyone needs a balance of both.
Rituals seem to fit perfectly in the middle of that Venn Diagram between the two kinds of happiness. They involve both pleasure-seeking and meaning-making—turkey and gratitude, cute groundhogs and hope—or meaning is made through the pure pleasure of ceremony with the ones you love. Someone once told me, “the universe rewards action more than intention,” and a ritual seems to be a superpowered intention.
Rituals can be silly, too: in fact, in “The Best Advice I’ve Ever Heard for How to Be Happy,” the first recommendation is, “Start a weird ritual,” which is recommended by behavioral scientist Michael Norton, who wrote The Ritual Effect. Apparently, every time his family has meatloaf, they put candles on it and sing, “Happy Meatloaf to You,” to the tune of the birthday song. They started it to get their daughter to eat meatloaf but it became a tradition.
The only time in my life I have been seriously enamored with the idea of a family of my own was when I met my friend’s mother and heard the story of how, once for Christmas, to prevent his trickster self from stealing downstairs to peek at who was really putting the presents under the tree, she made an elaborate web of duct tape and yarn and other obstacles at the top of the stairs. He dismantled it, carefully, confirmed Santa was his dad, but then put it back carefully, as if it had not been touched at all, and kept secret for a while the fact that he knew the secret. In the years after, the acts of doing, undoing, and redoing the web became as much a part of Christmas as the rest of it.
Of course, this ritual might very well have gone awry the first time: her son could have found the obstacle too much of an obstacle. Or he could have been more callous, taking apart but not putting back. But I was so enamored with this story in particular because it was such a targeted act of love: a ritual for her son, the puzzle-lover, a ritual that honored his obsession with precision and investigatory nature. It was pleasurable and meaningful in particular, to him.
The best rituals are both organic and tailor-made in this way, like inside jokes between close friends or a lovers’ lexicon. There is a callback. My friends and I would occasionally hold a Grumpsgiving, a time for airing grievances as an antidote to toxic positivity. And this was better than simply complaining more casually: now you were supposed to.
But the point of rituals, like any practice, is also to give you something to do even when you are uncreative, uninspired. An English professor I knew said funerals were appropriate places for clichés: at a funeral, you don’t necessarily want to say anything too original about someone else’s loss. The clichés are comforting, as are the rituals. I heard someone at a party talk about going on a breakup-moon, which is a new kind of ritual these days, for another kind of death; people in the past did not break up quite so frequently, nor have so many ways of haunting each others’ lives.
Still, I am most envious of lovers’ rituals, not the date nights or even weddings, but the stuff you make up together. A couple I know has a ritual around toothpaste: whoever goes to bed first squeezes the toothpaste for the other, so it’s ready to brush. Not the most hygienic hygiene routine, but still adorable. Another couple reads Edgar Allen Poe stories to each other before bed. I have always thought it would be interesting to attend couples counseling with a partner early on, before the conflicts start; in fact, I would even like to try going to a couples counselor for a second date, to process the first. The kind of person who would like this strange, intense ritual is possibly the kind of person whose sense of pleasure and meaning matches mine. Is anyone interested? If it doesn’t work out, we can always throw a cozy break-up dinner party to matchmake our friends.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.