“I have had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.” -Mark Twain
When I visit my parents now, every morning I celebrate daily rituals with my mother.
Rituals are very normal for her: celebrate the tulsi puja in the morning, read a few pages of Gita, The holy book of Hindu, worship the sun, and repeat the same in the evening.
When it turns dark, generally after dinner, we sit in the living room area and talk about her past years growing up in Solma, Tehrathum. We talk about her schooling, household chores routine, and her interest to join a religious community recently.
My mother always say these moments in her life as listening to the voice of God but I say it is the tuning of her life to live in the moment.
She is happy in going for long periods of time in complete religious worship.
My mother, her rituals, and my rituals
When my mother was sixteen years old, she met my father, they got married, and together they created four children.
My mother has studied up to grade six formally but she can read fluently and write in moderation in our native language.
My mother and father had an amazing relationship, but through it all they maintained a deeper connection to their god.
It wasn’t always fun, there were a lot of problems and scarcities in the family, I saw them growing up but my mother was good at living in the moment to cherish what she had.
I learned the lesson: cherish what you have, live in the moment and move forward.
It all sums up with Ernest Holm Svendsen, the author of “How to Live in the Now” says “This moment is it. It is everything. It is all there is, and the solution to any difficulty in your life is to be found here and here alone.”
I am sharing my mother’s story with you because her story might not be similar to your mother’s story but it reminds you your story.
Happiness and satisfaction always comes from the connections we build around our family.
Ritual is what binds a family together.
Ritual is what makes a family differentiated, unique, and memorable.
We each nurture an essential quality that evolves with sharing and listening to the rituals.
When we have rituals in the family, we pass on to our future generations, that help them to live their lives with conviction.
When I was in high school working on the farm, I used to daydream about the things that I didn’t have.
I didn’t know then but I know now, that was my ritual without me knowing.
Even daydreaming during that time inspired me because I didn’t have an electronic gadget then like today’s smartphone in my fingertip.
It doesn’t really matter what we do and what we achieve in life, if we don’t live with our rituals everyday, life becomes complex.
Once we adopt ritual, we don’t worry much about the past, and not much time worrying about the future too.
In other words, staying in the present is the way to live, cultivating the focus on the here and now and avoiding unnecessary concerns about the future.
Michael Norton, PhD, Harvard professor and author of “The Ritual Effect” says ” All intention-filled acts that drive human behavior are rituals and create surprising satisfaction and enjoyment.”
Ritual is living in the moment that just proliferates us in many directions.
When we live in the moment, we broaden our thinking, we see the world in different eyes.
At least, I view the world this way.
Sometimes, I used to think and still feel that I couldn’t become wealthy by this time, probably, one of my regrets occasionally appears inside me. But after reading Hans Rosling’s book “Factfulness” I realized why I should be happy even though I am not wealthy.
Because I am living with my rituals, and in the moment now.
Wealth, gratitude, and dissatisfaction
I had won little money in the past which was twice as sweet as the money that I earned.
I thought I could be wealthy.
But I also lost that won money immediately.
After certain times, I felt that money has a way of creating stress when there is no harmony how it comes and goes through my life.
I realized that it doesn’t matter how much I make or how much I spend, I must maintain good relationship with it.
If money creates only stress and takes my energy, then I must stop stressing about more money, I must live in the moment.
I remember David Rubenstein’s advice, an author of “How to Invest“, “find areas outside of investing that can enable you to broaden your scope as a human, and experience things other than the pursuit of money and professional success.”
I still don’t understand how to apply this in real life.
In the moment of dissatisfaction and unhappiness, I envision the world with my thoughts and gratitude.
I think about one billion people even today struggle everyday to find clean water, they work all day just to eat a meal at night.
There are another one billion people with an income that fulfills for most of life’s necessities.
Probably, I am in that category now.
And the remaining 6 billion are struggling to make the transition to get clean water to fulfill life’s necessities.
As I learnt from my mother, living in the moment gives us very different things about why we should enjoy what we have.
Let’s see the operation, how our mind works.
First we want to get clean water.
After this, we want to get nearby clean water.
After this, we want to get clean water at home.
After this, we want to get hot water for showers at home.
After this, we want to get hot water for showers attached in our bedroom.
The essence is that the pursuit of a better life will never end.
It keeps moving, this is another reason, living in the moment is so crucial.
The great enemy of our truth is not lie.
It’s dissatisfaction inside us.
Generally dissatisfactions are persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.
The only way dissatisfactions will settle once we start to live in the moment.
Start something as a ritual
One of the ways to live in the moment is to make something a ritual in our life.
For anything we do or want to build, we have to start somewhere.
We have to make it our one ritual.
Just start and see what happens.
See your internal clock that runs through your mind.
Make small adjustments in your task as you progress along the way.
When we do adjustments, it inspires us to move ahead further with more refinement.
Do it again whatever time interval is suitable to you.
Do it again when you feel doing.
You may not accomplish anything substantial but you sleep well, you feel happy and satisfied. You enjoy each moment of your involvement. I’m sure you live in the moment.
Living in the moment teaches us one more thing that nobody makes a perfect thing, and you will never create a perfect thing, because it doesn’t exist.
However, the thing you create, whatever it is, will reflect the life you want to live, that is what we all want.
What matters most is creating harmony with our desire, embracing the life of abundance, and making small progress every day.
You, your family, your mundane work, your ritual. Just think.
We have to slow down our life to live in the moment.
We must celebrate our daily mundane work, the more we celebrate these works throughout the day, the more we live in the moment.
Over the last few years, one ritual I have developed is reading books that interest me beyond my profession.
Sometimes I read one page or few pages in a day, sometimes I don’t.
But I always keep the book of my interest in the house in my access, maybe in the living room or bed room or dining table, or in the bathroom.
This ritual helped me learn a lot about life and purpose.
Recently, I have been reading a book by Dr. William Li, MD, “Eat to Beat Disease” that explains about food as a medicine, and various research labs across the globe are working on it, where I found out about prostate cancer.
I found that tomatoes decrease the risk of prostate cancer by 30 percent.
I am amazed that I am a chemical scientist by training but I had no clue what tomatoes do in our body.
I knew that tomatoes contain a bioactive lycopene that inhibits angiogenesis, blood supply to cancer cells.
This is just one example of how we transform our and other people’s lives just by cherishing our mundane ritual.
One question that should continue to come up is how can the global community continue to move to the next level by nurturing a ritual.
Conclusion
I am relating one example of my family friend who is suffering from cancer now.
I came to know this when I was involved in running a campaign for awareness of cancer.
I can feel how painful this disease is.
If you have cancer, or have ever had it, what would be your ritual in life?
Of course, your number one focus would be to kill those cancer stem cells.
But how?
I know there’s no medicine that can kill cancer stem cells yet, but there are a growing number of foods, and their bioactives’ roles in our body.
Many of those bioactives of foods are being studied for their suppressive effects on cancer stem cells.
Fortunately, foods that target cancer stem cells don’t harm beneficial stem cells.
My friend’s current ritual is to read about those foods and their bioactives that might suppress the cancer stem cells.
Once we cherish our ritual, we have to learn to get in touch with the silence within ourselves, and we must know that everything in life has purpose.
One thing I learned growing up in a farming family is that there are no mistakes, coincidences, and regrets, all events are blessings given to us to learn from.
Just cherish those moments and move forward.
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.