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Saturday 12 September 2015

Daily Prompt: Daily Ritual

Think about your day. Select one of your daily rituals and explain it to us: why do you do what you do? How did you come to adopt this ritual? What happens on days when you can’t perform it?

.Cow

Life is full of daily rituals. If it was just one it would be boring although I am sure this cow is not bored when it munches away at its grass ration. Even if there is no grass the farmer moves the herd to another field in Summer where the grass has regrown, or in Winter they get hay. Life is not only rituals, but adaption.

And so we also adapt. There was a time when I was standing on a borderline, shall I continue with the Daily Prompt? It was regularly repeated day for day, prompts I had already written. I then made a decision to stop, to remove this part of my daily life and so I adapted and began to write something else. Was it an omen, did the daily prompt team recognise that one of their faithful followers would be missing? I definitely do not think so, I heard there were even some that were glad my regular appearance would disappear, but where there is a will there is a way. No-one is indispensable. In the words of Jeremy Belknap (who?) “old habits die hard”, and so it is.

It was at this time that the daily prompt team decided to renew the daily prompts with suggestions from writers like me and after a day in exile, I decided to return and I am back. Of course I can live without a daily prompt, life does not revolve around a daily prompt. There are various housewife chores to be dealt with, meals to be cooked and shopping expeditions to be ventured, but somewhere in the afternoon there are 30-40 minutes where I sit at my keyboard and write what comes into my mind. 

It has become a ritual over the years I suppose. Of course there are times when the prompt is omitted, due to my absence. In July I was away for 5 days attending my son’s wedding in Germany, and I will again disappear the last week of September when I will be in London for a week visiting my dad and celebrating his 100th birthday. My computer is then left to its own fate, awaiting my return.

One day I will be gone forever, writing my prompt on another level, somewhere in the happy daily prompt hunting grounds and telling everyone all about it, my page might even still exist, but I will not be writing it in person, just my shadow. This may seem a somewhat dark side of writing, but it so happens that in the past I have witnessed friends that were gone forever from the cyberworld and I know there will be more.

So don’t cry for me WordPress. I just had a look at some statistics in the web on WordPress and realised that I am not alone out here. There are millions of us so how could I be missed one day and the turnover will still be arriving.

What a morbid entry this is becoming, but heads up. We bought a new hoover this week, as a second hoover. My original Dyson is still doing its job, but we now have the handy plug-it-in and charge it constantly model for the small jobs like crumbs on the kitchen floor, or dead fly matter in  Summer. Just a quick switch on and it is all sucked up into the new portable handy Dyson. Dyson is naturally not just a daily ritual, but a way of life. It could also be a Hoover, Bosch or Miele, they all do the job. I must go, another daily ritual is calling.

2 comments:

  1. As I'm still a working person my weekdays are controlled by the working ritual, but even when at home I tend to do things in a certain way. I am sure that I would be considered to be OCD-ish in the way I have to do things in a certain order. For example, when I arrive home from work it is always....make coffee, spend an hour on the computer catching up with friends, phone mom, make dinner, watch some TV. Always in that order. If I do it differently, it doesn't feel 'right'.

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    1. I think we all have a little OCD. I do the same routine every morning, and Mr. Swiss does his as well. If something gets in the way I start working out how to do it all the same, and if I don't do it, something is missing.

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