Marriage often means taking the right steps

Beautiful day for a wedding - 2nd April 2011

I grew up in a place and time that no longer exists.  The planet doesn’t spin in and out of the same places it did when I was a child.

The universe moves on, taking the galaxies and their solar systems with them.

However, I look out the window on this day (an arbitrary time period assigned to when this part of the planet faces the nearest star) and wonder about homogeneous subcultures.

Where I grew up, even though not everyone participated in the same ritual 0f combining days into groups of seven, delineating one of those days for a period of little work, I expected everyone to treat the five weekdays differently than the two weekend days and especially reserve the first (or last day) as special (i.e., Sunday).

Sure, we could sit here and go off on a tangent about the history of calendrical systems and why 24-hour periods have unique repetitive names but I’ll leave that exercise to the curious, uneducated, and/or forgetful reader.

Do you have a day you set aside for special activities?  How much do you focus only on those activities and not get dragged into others’ rituals on that day?

For instance, in my childhood subculture we tagged Sunday as a reverent day, meaning the first half of the day was dedicated to religious rituals.

Although in morning meetings we discussed a holy text that implied one should perform no work on Sunday (with perpetual, perennial discussions of the definition of work), later in the day we ate at restaurants where workers prepared meals for us, filled our petrol tanks with fuel where workers operated the fuel pumps and sold prepackaged food and drink, and watched moving images on the television tube that broadcast “live” events where people performed/watched sports-related activities.

Thus, although we said we should, our subculture did not treat the day like a perfectly w0rkfree one for every person.

Through the years, as adults, my wife and I have observed our neighbours treat Sunday as a special day dedicated to one’s hobbies or pleasures – tuning raceboats/motorcycles/racecars, golfing, lawnmowing, yardworking (planting flowers/trees, weeding/feeding), sporting (volleyball, badminton, horseshoes, target shooting), swimming, sunbathing, houseworking (roof repair, painting, window washing, vacuuming), etc.

How dedicated are you to your ritual practices?

Do you find any exceptions to the rule, not just emergencies, that distract you from repeating behaviour you and/or your subculture deem most important?

Where I grew up, I could look into the lives of the individuals and families who treated the hours and days of their lives with reverence, giving every minute the total focus it deserved because we don’t get any more.  The more successful ones often appeared to be the most dedicated to specific behaviours, including reverent rituals.

Success and goalsetting may seem like words from antiquity sometimes, coming from an era when efficiency experts walked around with stopwatches and clipboards to measure factory output.

Are there behaviours for which you willingly ignore distractions in order to dedicate yourself to perfection?

Are those behaviours tied to orbits and rotations of the planet we share together?

When do we realise that our children need us to put aside our childlike thought patterns and act more purely like parents toward them, knowing that at the same time we may act like children to our parents (but, then, what do we do with that last behaviour set after our parents have died)?

As states of energy (parents) reproducing similar states of energy (children), is there a pure, “natural” state of parenthood that exists outside of the intermixed subcultures that define modern life (“modern” being a term that refers to the last ten thousand years)?

What is a successful parent?

What is a successful child?

What is the “child” or “parent” goal of a person who never stops being a child or a parent?

In my subculture, we would respond, “honour your mother and father,” who themselves are honouring their parents, dead or alive.

I have a smorgasbord of parental behaviours from which to choose to honour, not only from my parents and their parents but also from my parents’ friends who are parents and the behaviours they honoured with their ritual-like dedication to perfection.

In other words, on this day when many from my childhood are spending time at houses of worship, reading from the holy text or singing in unison, I should ignore the loud internal combustion engine of the riding lawnmower that my neighbour insists on operating only and early on Sundays, my family’s traditional day of rest from such activities.

After all, my sitting here and dedicating myself to meditating and speaking about our rituals may appear to others to violate the holy ordinance to refrain from working on this day.

“Subject to interpretation” may have been a better title for today’s blog entry but I was concerned people might interpret it the wrong way.