Ritual

The meaning and the satisfactions of life derive from human interaction, for without others there is no self; without organization there is no society; without society humanity does not exist.

The institutionalization of sentiment in ritual form...reinforces the positive feelings essential to collaboration, [and] it allays the negative feelings that are potentially disruptive either to the community or to individual performance. It operates in the context of established meanings and understandings, and these taken together are what we often call religion, for everywhere emotions are thus "ritualized". The invention of ritual to structure human sentiment was crucial to the evolution of humanity...[T]he rapid evolution of culture and the world-wide spread of humanity did not take place until the Upper Paleolithic; that is, until ritual behavior is clearly evidenced as a part of the cultural repertoire. --Walter Goldschmidt, The Human Career; pp. 202-203

Ritual is the institutionalization of sentiment, even when it is only between two people. It is meant to change you. Once you go through a ritual, you will never be the same - no matter how small the change is. One cannot "undo" a ritual.

Friday, April 21st in 2006 I asked my girlfriend to marry me. This was something I had been ready to do for some time. I had obsessed over it, planned it, obliterated my plans, started planning again...in the end it was completely unplanned. I did it then and there because the feeling was right. I was standing there drenched in the sentiment I was looking to capture for our marriage. And by ritualizing it, I did capture it. I grabbed that moment and that feeling and froze it in time by asking her.

Something definitely changed when I asked her. We have been together a long time, but this ritual has moved us to the next plane of relation, interaction. And with the telling of our parents and the drinking of champagne we have begun to become a new social entity in our society, a "married couple", with all the societal expectations that go with it.

The self does not exist without the other. The other makes the self exist in its own mind. There is no such thing as marriage without ritual. The ritual makes the marriage exist as the social institution that it is. This would be true even if the people marrying were the only ones aware of the ritual. It only takes two people to have culture.

So, I suppose the lesson for the day is that sybolism is our shared reality. Or, no, maybe symbolism creates our shared reality. Hmmm...a semantic rubix cube...