Ceremony is our portion of life, they define moments. Without ceremony, moments come seamless and our eyes begin to skip the stitches or the stitches become amnesiac sedatives and we forget that they once existed.
The stitches are ceremonies in and out of a moment. It is the stitches that define the beginnings and ends of a moment. They are chapter ends and beginnings. They precede and follow the crescendo of a score.
Do you ever find yourself waiting in your car after you get home, allowing space between the drive and the arrival? Wouldn’t the drive itself be a stitch? No, the drive is a moment. Without that recognition there is drive-home long tail at the end of your workday, where it wasn't tucked away and now stretches down the M1.
What are we doing on our drive home?
Ruminating on disagreements with colleagues?
Chewing on the injustices that we didn't rise to?
The imagery of the day bleeds into the new moment of being home and colours it, distorting your presence. Your working moment needs to be stitched to your drive home and then stitched to your getting home moment.
I've been calling it priming. Engines are primed before having a load applied. Athletes prime before the competition. Speakers prime before their keynote. We too must prime for our next moment. Part of the priming necessarily includes the letting go of the moment we are leaving.
As we stitch moments together, closing things off and priming for the next, we create breathing room and allow our bodies to show up with desired presence.
Ryan Dickinson