Rituals help us slow the break-neck speed of life

Molly, my youngest child, turned five yesterday.

There’s something about five that is so very different from four. When people are small, each year brings so many changes, such significant growing. But five feels like the difference between a very small kid and a kid. My baby is now a kid.

After seeing this happen with my three others, I might not be surprised at her long limbs, her precocious vocabulary, and her acute awareness of so much in the world. Still, I find myself looking at my thirteen-year-old daughter, and back to my five-year-old and asking, “How does this happen so quickly?”

Of course, when you’re in the thick of it, it doesn’t always go so quickly, right? One of my favorite New Yorker cartoons pictures two toddlers on a playground, their mothers sprawled out on a bench watching them. One mother says to the other something like, “It goes by so slowly.” Show me a parent who can’t relate to that.

Still, we do see our kids grow up and we do feel the sometimes frenetic pace of life. As a child, I wondered at how much adults went on about how children grow. Now, as one of those adults, I experience the whiplash that comes in watching kids grow up.

Life can move with such force and velocity, that we often feel like we can’t keep up. We all know that the swiftly-moving life phenomenon isn’t relegated to children. This is one of the reasons I am such a proponent of marking important events along the way. When there’s so much life happening so quickly, rituals give us anchor points for the times that really matter. When we create a ritual around a moment, it’s as if we’ve staked a little flag on the timeline of our lives. Even if we don’t remember everything precisely, the ritual gives us a point of reference, a way of making sense of a long and varied life.

We remember when someone is born or dies and life fills in around that important event.  We take time to honor a loved one’s contribution at a retirement party, and they have a chance to see what their work has meant over time to many people. We mark the coming-of-age with our daughter and we see her better prepared to face the world as a young woman.

We have to find the right way to honor each person. Not everyone likes to be the center of attention. Some people don’t like any attention at all. But there’s usually some way to mark an important moment. Taking the time to say, “Hey, you’re important to me” is never a wasted effort. In my experience, this effort not only benefits the person being honored, but also the people planning and attending the event or ceremony. Acknowledging each other is one of the ways that we feel connected to each other, to our families, or our larger communities.

So yesterday, I had five princesses at my house. Molly met each princess at the door, sprinkled her with gold glitter and led her into the castle. Once inside, the black stallion rode through the valley. The knights (or robbers, depending on the moment) chased the princesses. There was the inevitable quest for the tail properly placed on the pony. A treasure hunt ended with a box of gold in the form of honey sticks and magic wands and crowns to decorate. It was a day worth remembering.

Some of my most vivid memories are of my mother making parties for us kids. Halloween parties with dry ice and peeled-grape eyeballs. New Year’s Eve parties with sandwiches on tiny little pieces of rye bread. And birthday parties: surprises dress-up parties in the park, sleepovers with gaggles of girls, sophisticated dinners with spinach crepes.

And Molly will likely remember five because of her princess party. It was fun, of course. But the party will also help her make a little more sense to the passing of time. The party helped strengthen her community of neighbor girls. And the party places her firmly in her family and reminds her that she’s important. Oh, and she is.

This buoyant, funny, and nurturing girl has already changed the world so much in her first five years. As she moves along, she’ll learn ever more about how to give what she’s got to the world.

And that is worth vacuuming up gold glitter for the next week.