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

by Sasha Sagan

Being alive was presented to me as profoundly beautiful and staggeringly unlikely, a sacred miracle of random chance.

“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.

I see myself as a Jew even as I sit here writing a book about my lack of faith.

Every culture from the Amish to the Maasai has coming-of-age rituals that, at their core, are the same as any bar mitzvah, quinceañera, or sweet sixteen you’ve ever been to. Not to mention the vast array of human ways to welcome a newborn, marry a couple, or honor the dead. Ecstatic joy to deepest sorrow, the heart of these rituals lies beyond belief.

An old tradition is not intrinsically better than a new one. Especially when it is such a joy to make new ones up—ones that reflect exactly what you believe, ones that make sense of your life as you experience it, ones that bring the world a little closer to the way you wish it could be.

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.

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.