Rituals as Recovery

Charting a path through the "messy middle"

It’s Friday as I write this, and I’m thinking about a few things that I do nearly every weekend. Bake two loaves of bread. Make a batch of kombucha. Go for a long run. Some might call these hobbies, but I know them as rituals. 

When I was preparing for our family move from Iowa to Pennsylvania, a friend suggested that I read Bruce Feiler’s book Life Is in the Transitions. Feiler interviewed hundreds of people about major life transitions – what he calls “lifequakes” – and found that those who successfully rebuilt their lives showed some common behaviors. They embraced their grief for the life they had left behind, established rituals to tangibly work through their grieving, and dropped a habit that had previously held them back. 

I read Feiler’s book months before we moved, thinking it would give me a plan to follow. But there was no way to fully anticipate the desperation that swept over me after I walked out of my office for the last time. I thought change would bring more relief than sadness. That leaning into family life and the chance to write full-time would anchor me. I was wrong. At least initially. 

I made a few mistakes that I hope anyone reading this might avoid. The first was thinking that all of my planning could leapfrog me straight over the grieving process. This proved to be spectacularly misguided. The second was reacting to grief with my old habit, which I describe in “The Calling,” of reducing meaning and purpose to one thing. If I was no longer a professor, I’d be an even more successful writer. All of my eggs went into that basket, and in about two months I recreated much the same tension between work and family life that I’d sought to escape by resigning my faculty position. I was deeply uncomfortable with what Feiler describes as the “messy middle,” where people in transition either remain mired in old patterns or drop less useful habits and build new ones. 

Which brings me back to bread, kombucha, and running. These were all rituals before our family transition, and simply repeating them as I always have is quite different from Feiler’s notion of new ceremonies explicitly tied to grieving. The more I’ve thought about it, each of my rituals began as either a coping strategy or as an intentional choice to fill unstructured time with purpose. I suspect that completing my life transition won’t require me to give up all of the old ways. But it likely will require a new ritual or two. This series is one of those new ceremonies explicitly tied to my grief, and it’s already softened the loneliness of transition. Maybe recalling the origins of my old rituals will help reinvent them or replace them with something new.

Bread baking began three years ago as an unofficial sabbatical project. In addition to my academic goals, I wanted to do something useful for my family. I’ll admit that this was not totally altruistic. I grew up preferring my mother’s homemade bread to anything I could buy, and I wanted a slice of the good stuff as much for myself as for my kids. At first I borrowed my wife’s copy of Good to the Grain and managed some respectable loaves of whole wheat bread. But it was a long process – at least half a day – that required an old-school mixer and created a huge mess. There was no way I’d keep doing that after going back to work full-time. So I went looking for help. 

My friend Val pointed me toward Josey Baker’s cookbook. That dude has quite a personality on the page, and man does he have a useful set of recipes. Instead of devoting half a day to baking a loaf, Baker breaks the process into stages that each require only a few minutes. Plus, his bread tastes much better than the molasses loaves I’d been making. Breakfast and packed lunches are a little more complicated now that my oldest daughter spurns any bread other than mine. But you know I’m also proud of that. Thanks to Val, I was also at least a year ahead of everyone else who started baking their way through the pandemic. 

Kombucha is another ritual that takes only thirty minutes once a week. There are a ton of easy recipes online, but I’ve had good luck with this one. It’s satisfying to crack a swing-top bottle at lunch, listen to the fizz, and savor the taste (which I’ll admit is acquired). When I want an alternative to beer, kombucha gives me a little kick without the dehydration. It’s fun to offer to guests, and I’m always happy when I see a glass of it at my wife’s desk in the afternoon. 

This principle of reciprocity is one distinction between rituals and hobbies, as I define them. The word “hobby” originally comes from “hobby horse,” the rocking toy for toddlers. A hobby is something I do mainly for my own pleasure. It improves my life, but I’d be fine without it. A ritual is a practice that connects me to others, grounds me in a place, or resets my internal equilibrium. 

The distinction is especially crucial in my approach to running. In an essay that eventually became a chapter in my memoir, I describe how I turned to running for resilience during a year abroad. After I completed my master’s degree, I needed a break before committing to a PhD, and a college friend offered me a job teaching English in Uruguay. I had no teaching experience and quickly discovered that I was in over my head. The religious rituals I’d been taught to fall back on during times of crisis weren’t working, so I turned to running as one aspect of my day that I could control. The problem was that I needed to feel pain to complete the stress cycle, and my daily runs became nearly indistinguishable from self-harm. 

I still associate running alone with that unsettling year abroad. It has been easy to adopt a similar mindset during the pandemic, retreating from others into the rhythm of my feet on the pavement and my breath in the frosty air. But that is a survival mentality, not a restorative ritual. 

So I’m trying to embrace Feiler’s advice by rethinking running as a way to build community. Some of my best memories involve running with friends along the Iowa backroads. But that happened in the life before COVID that feels so distant to us all now. It takes effort to plan a group run or sign up for a race. I can kill half a day driving to a rendezvous point, waiting on others if they’re late, changing clothes afterward so I don’t soak the driver’s seat with my sweat. It’s pretty easy to talk myself out of it and just chart a route from my front door. But I recognize these excuses as part of the academic mindset I’m trying to shed. You know, the one that places a premium on professional output and minimizes everything else. 

Someone told me recently that nobody meets up for lunch anymore because then they’d fall behind on their work. It’s why I used to plan my workouts before breakfast, so I could squeeze every drop of productivity out of the day. But the reason for running isn’t to make me a more efficient worker. And running alone really is just a short-term hit of endorphins: useful enough for self-care, but still narrow in scope. If I want to embrace running as a ritual that might help complete this life transition, I need a longer view. 

Next weekend I’m planning to join an eleven-mile run. I’ll need to ask my father-in-law to pick me up at the end for a shuttle back to my car. We’ll need a plan for the kids. The COVID restrictions might keep me from chatting as much with other runners before and after as I’d like. All of these could be reasons not to bother. But I’m eager to learn a new route. Instead of dropping an old habit, I’ll be trying to expand it. Along the first three miles, which I’m told climb more than a thousand feet, I’ll be able to tell from the gasping around me that I’m not suffering alone. And that will be a welcome story to tell.

If you’d like to share your own rituals and how you’ve relied on them to weather a lifequake, I’d love to hear about them. I expect I’ll revisit this topic frequently over the year, since my backlog is too deep to include here. Gardening is a series of essays in itself, and I expect I’ll have plenty to say this summer about how canning salsa and hot sauce binds me to others. But perhaps the oldest ritual, and one of the first to fall prey to my academic life, is music. I’m curious how a return to songwriting and sharing music with others might also open a path through the messy middle of transition.