Meditation: On The Importance Of Ceremony

Since the last newsletter, we bore witness to the coronation of a new king for the United Kingdom and fourteen other Commonwealth realms. An event which gave the people of Britain another Bank Holiday and a cause for celebration. The estimated cost of the coronation is somewhere between £50 - £100 million which became a news story of its own. The new king's personal wealth is estimated at £1.8bn and was not impinged by the proceedings; the coronation is a state affair and the taxpaying people of the state foot the bill. A hard pill to swallow in a cost-of-living crisis but that is not the point of this article. Whether you are a royalist, monarchist, anarchist or nudist... ceremony is important.

Typically, ceremonies (and celebrations) take place around momentous moments in a human life. Births, deaths and marriages. They exist in other forms as a way of marking the transition from one state of being to the next, often higher, state i.e. graduations and passing out parades.

The word ceremony has its roots in the Latin, caerimonia, meaning sacredness, reverence or a sacred rite and was originally tied to religious worship. The burning of incense, the reading of passages and the singing of hymns are all cousins of the chanting of songs in the terraces of football grounds or the clapping of hands as the curtain falls in a theatre.

We humans are social creatures, we survive and thrive by our inclusion in the tribe and ceremonies are the way in which we re-affirm our tribes and our positions within them. The primitive human mind finds peace in the thought: whichever rung of the ladder you are on, at least you're on the ladder.

As global population increases, cultures becoming more niche and our traditional village environs become disbanded and digitalised, it can be hard to find meaningful ceremony or even meaning in ceremony.

My suggested remedy is finding personal ceremony.

Work out a way in which you can definitively mark an occasion and, in doing so, create a moment of personal recognition and reflection as you step over the threshold into a new epoch or state of being.

For me, that ceremony is smoking a cigar. I'm aware of how pretentious that sounds. Even reading that line back I find it slightly preposterous and yet it is my thing.

A cigar takes careful attention to light and maintain. The smell and taste, which I greatly enjoy (make sure you enjoy your personal ceremony!), is intoxicating and unlike any other in my day-to-day life (make sure your personal ceremony is separate to your normal routine). The time it takes to smoke - and the fact that the act is tied to the breath - gives me ample time to reflect and consider as I stand on the meridian between the before and the after. Another hidden bonus for me is that, these days, smoking (especially smoking a cigar) is a bit on the anti-social side which means that I can steal myself away and look back on the venue and those gathered therein and truly savour the moment.

I urge you to find your own private act of ceremony and follow it with all the sacredness and reverence owed to a sacred rite.

It needn't be expensive or extravagant - it's probably a good idea to pick something more healthful than mine.

You just need something that requires you to be intentional and stop for a moment to consider how far you've come and how far you'll go.