For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World

by Sasha Sagan

“for small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love.”

We all deserve holidays, celebrations, and traditions. We all need to mark time. We all need community. We all need to bid hello and goodbye to our loved ones. I do not believe that my lack of faith makes me immune to the desire to be part of the rhythm of life on this planet.

Beneath the specifics of all our beliefs, sacred texts, origin stories, and dogmas, we humans have been celebrating the same two things since the dawn of time: astronomy and biology. The changing of the seasons, the long summer days, the harvest, the endless winter nights, and the blossoming spring are all by-products of how the Earth orbits the sun. The phases of the moon, which have dictated the timing of rituals since the dawn of civilization, are the result of how the moon orbits us. Birth, puberty, reproduction, and death are the biological processes of being human. Throughout the history of our species, these have been the miracles, for lack of a better word, that have given us meaning.

You say a prayer, light a candle, make a dessert just the way they did, and imagine the nameless generations stretching back into the past. There is a pleasure in this. It’s a kind of connectedness, a kind of time travel, providing a sense of certainty in what’s tried and true.

It’s easy to forget how amazing this is. Days and weeks go by and the regularity of existing eclipses the miraculousness of it. But there are certain moments when we manage to be viscerally aware of being alive. Sometimes those are very scary moments, like narrowly avoiding a car accident. Sometimes they are beautiful, like holding your newborn in your arms. And then there are the quiet moments in between, when all the joy and sorrow seem profound only to you.

Time is an elusive concept. It’s passing constantly, yet it’s so hard to feel. It’s like lying in the grass, trying to feel the Earth rotate. When changes are both small and constant, we can’t grasp them. But watching a sunset, for example, we can process that we’ve successfully completed another rotation.

Even the coffee Jon brings me every morning feels like sorcery. Something grows in the earth. It’s harvested, roasted, ground, and percolated. I drink it and, like Alice, I am changed. It wakes me up. It gives me strength and speed; superpowers, really. At the end of the day, a glass of wine is another kind of potion. Another plant comes out of the earth, is readied by technique and time, and when drunk has the power to unwind you, let you take a step back, and quell stress. So many everyday rituals amount to a magic trick being performed by biology, technology, or some other branch of science. How different would our daily lives be if we found ways to celebrate even the smallest wizardry in life?

The war on nuance in our politics and culture tries to oversimplify complicated issues: If you criticize the injustices in your country you must hate the troops! or How can you support that candidate when she’s obviously not perfect? Our fear of complexity, our inability to, as my dad put it, “tolerate ambiguity,” is so often one of our biggest failings.

You’ll have some joy and some pain, and all the other experiences that make up what it’s like to be a tiny part of a grand cosmos. No matter what happens next, you were here.