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Tag Archives: Ritual

It’s Not Brand Loyalty, It’s a Ritual

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I don’t have a great track record for getting attributions right, but I think it’s Tai Chi that has the idea that humans have a finite amount of energy. That if you slow your movements down enough, you extend that energy, and by extension, your life.
Please don’t fact-check me. It will ruin my train of thought.
The problem is, I can’t really slow my body down any further. I work from home. I sit at my desk all day. I make a genuine effort to never leave the house.

So instead of slowing my body, I simplify everything else.

For example: I visit a relative via the same bus route every single time.
I’ll take this bus over any other. I’ll wait for it, even in bad weather. I’ll accept delays. I’ll stand, or squash in with a busy bus, headphones pressed into my ears, because I know exactly where this route goes and how it feels to be on it. Other routes would get me there too. They would just require me to pay attention.

Once you notice I do this with buses, you’ll start noticing the same commitment in other areas too.
My laundry would give me away immediately. I own two — sometimes three — of the same items.

This isn’t really a commitment to a style. That’s just a happy bonus. These items work. They fit where I expect them to. The fabric feels right. The pockets are the correct size, which matters more than fashion ever will.

Owning multiple copies means I don’t have to jump and dance through the process of shopping and fitting again any time soon. It’s an elimination of future problems. A small act of foresight that saves me from reinventing the wheel under bad lighting. That’s the whole point.

And if you’re paying attention to my style, you’ll spot another small secret.
There are almost always three bangles on my left wrist. They come in a variety of colours, but they’re all the same weight, the same style, the same material.
Different colours, identical experience.

These things could easily be mistaken for me being really committed to certain brands.
I’m not.

This is my mental equivalent of getting up early and practising very slow movements in the park. Something like tai chi, if you squint. The kind of scene that looks serene and purposeful in an action movie, where the character is clearly preparing for something.

It’s much less cinematic to watch me simply repeat the same choices over and over again.
What this buys me is energy. Not more of it — just less wasted.
I arrive places calmer. I’m not already tired from the logistics of getting there. I have more attention left for the people I’m with, more capacity for the thing I actually showed up to do.

The bus route, the clothes, the jewellery — they don’t make my life smaller. They make it quieter. They remove friction in places where friction adds nothing, so I can spend what I have on the parts that matter.

It’s not cinematic.
It works.

Pull me from the Upside Down

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On music as memory, misdirection, and rescue

In another life I would have been a rock star. All ego and wild wardrobe choices, making an artistic choice to stain my fingers black à la Michèle Lamy, and crying at the end of every concert.

But the closest I ever got was being a radio producer, and occasionally hosting some lunchtime shows. We won’t talk about the disastrous time I had to read the news. Local radio really used to be all hands on deck.

I miss the radio show, the playlists, the variety of niche music programmes. I don’t get that much any more.

I love music.

Mixtapes Were a Language

I grew up in the era of mixtapes.

Actual tapes. Hours spent deciding what went where, which song opened, which one closed, what you were saying by putting that track after this one. You couldn’t skip casually. You had to commit. Making a mixtape for someone meant effort, attention, intention.

It was a way of saying this is how I feel, without having to say it out loud.

I was good at making them too. Handing one over with no track list, keeping you guessing with each pause between tracks. Could you pick out the theme before the end?

Why Covers Hit Harder

Cover songs were clutch at keeping folks guessing, but also making them listen, really listen, to the lyrics.

Hurt.

Nine Inch Nails? Melancholic. Empty. A song of absence. A quiet, furious piece that closed Trent Reznor’s live shows like a final fuck you.

Johnny Cash’s cover of Hurt.

Ooft.
Tears.

Sinéad O’Connor — Nothing Compares 2 U
Faith No More — Easy
Yael Naim — Toxic
Muse — Feeling Good
I Fight Dragons — The Power of Love

I could go on, but I’ll save the Patrick Bateman monologue for another time.

I love music.

And I think that’s why the Upside Down idea lodged itself in my brain.

In Stranger Things, when one of the characters gets taken away, and they’re panicked, hurt, untethered from the real world, their friends don’t argue them back to safety. Nobody explains. Nobody instructs.

They play the song that knows them.
And they find their own way out.

Music as a tether.
Music as a way home.

What I loved most wasn’t the drama of it, but the simplicity. The idea that you don’t have to be clever in the moment you’re overwhelmed. You don’t have to articulate anything. You just need the right sound to pull you back into yourself.

And maybe after all this year’s therapy, a grown-up realisation: you’re allowed to choose that song in advance. You’re allowed to tell people what will reach you. You don’t have to hope they guess.

How You Find Me

So when I’m lost. When I’m untethered, overwhelmed, and unable to ask for help. When I’m upside down, this is how you pull me back.

You’ve Got the Love — Florence + the Machine.

I suppose it makes sense that it’s a cover.
I’ve always been better at saying things with other people’s songs.

Six Months of Quiet Company

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This week marks six months of living alone… well not exactly, but also kinda.
I share a house with five other people. We cross paths in the kitchen, politely ignore each other’s laundry, and share an unspoken agreement that we don’t discuss the quality of bathroom singing.

It’s not solitude exactly, more like a soft coexistence.

The Middle Ground

After nearly twenty years of living with partners and kids and noise, this has been my quiet middle ground. I still hear footsteps, laughter, the occasional blender. It’s reassuring. There’s life here, just not mine to manage.

I’m probably the oldest person in the house by a good stretch. Everyone else has energy that hums, it’s just a different frequency. One I can admire from a time worn path.

I joke that I’m the household cryptid: sightings are rare, but the evidence of my existence (mugs, tea, the occasional scent of toast) is undeniable. But I make the joke only to myself, gods forbid I engage in conversation… I have a spooky reputation to maintain.

The Comfort

It’s oddly comforting. I can be social on my own terms and vanish without explanation. There’s no loneliness in it, just the small luxury of choosing my own volume.

Six months in, I’ve realised this is the kind of independence that suits me. Not isolation, not reinvention, just steady, ordinary living.

The Aggressively Peaceful Bit

There’s something deeply satisfying about being a quiet part of other people’s world. The house hums. The lights shift. Someone else’s playlist seeps through the walls. And I’m here making coffee, answering messages from my people, and feeling, finally, at home.

Because peace doesn’t always come with silence. Sometimes it’s the sound of someone else’s blender at 7 a.m. and the soft, defiant joy of knowing you’re building a life that’s aggressively peaceful.

“Even Bad Coffee…”

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I’ve drunk more bad coffee than good, but I’ve never turned down a cup.

The Worst Coffee

When my local Krispy Kreme opened they handed me a cup of what can only be described as caffeinated despair. Burn shots of coffee poured over the water of disappointment. I didn’t complain, obviously, I just drank it and ate my donut. I even went back, just to see if I had been wrong, like it was some sort of Emperors New Clothes trick.

I left the second time absolutely aghast that somewhere could make coffee that was so bad, even I hated it. But I still drank it.
Because having bad coffee in hand is still better than having nothing. Lynch knew.

The Best Coffee

On the other end of the spectrum sits Mr Bun’s Bakery, a café in Wellington, New Zealand where I had the best coffee of my life. It was a rainy day, the coffee was the right temperature, the sounds of Wellington just hit the right tempo, and it was just perfect.

Shhh. Just for a moment. Let me remember. FUCK.

I doubt I remember the actual coffee correctly these days. It was more than 20 years ago. If you’ve ever been to Mr Bun’s Bakery in Wellington, New Zealand you’re probably confused at how it’s the best coffee of my life. But every cup since has been chasing that high, and none of them have even come close. It hasn’t stopped me trying though.

Why I Keep Drinking It Anyway

Here’s the thing: it’s not just about taste. I didn’t describe the roast or the altitude the beans were grown at. What the mix of Arabica and Robusta was. Did I get a flat white, or a doppio? Did that matter?

For years I thought I just loved coffee. I’ve worked in coffee chains, opened my own coffee shop. In one place I worked you could plot the times I was away from the location by the change in the amount of beans used in that week. My coffee consumption literally tracked by the kilogram.

Turns out, I was probably self-medicating undiagnosed ADHD with americanos and loyalty cards. Coffee helped me focus. It gave me a ritual. It gave my restless hands something to do and my restless brain something to cling to.

The weirdest part? I’ve never had a caffeine withdrawal headache in my life. Not once. Apparently my nervous system just accepted that coffee is part of the package deal. Superpower, or giant red flag? Hard to tell.

Ritual Over Quality

Good or bad, coffee is less about flavour and more about existence. It’s a prop. A crutch. Proof of life. Even the worst cup can trick my brain into thinking I’m at least doing something.

So yes, I’ll complain. I’ll roll my eyes at the sludge in my cup. But I’ll still drink it. Because god forbid I sit here with nothing in my hands but my thoughts.

Closing Sip

Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all.” – David Lynch

I’m fortunate these days that I don’t have to go to Krispy Kreme for coffee, my children don’t need to be bribed with donuts when we go to the city center. There are many great places to get coffee within a short walk, but non of them are Mr Bun’s Bakery.

Never forget David Lynch was right.

Knitting Is My Favorite Distraction

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“First you need to take the yarn in your right hand…“

I didn’t go to a class, or learn from a wise relative passing down ancient yarn secrets. I learned to knit from YouTube — which means my teachers were mostly disembodied hands with suspiciously good manicures.

I was pregnant with my first child, and I wanted to make a baby blanket. It’s so cliche it cool. The blanket was simple, except I choose to do colourwork too, because I can’t possibly start with something plain. It was finished before my baby was born, but did not survive contact with the babies dad putting it directly into the washing machine. Wool on a regular wash. Dear Reader, I cried.

Somehow, despite the destruction of my first finished item, I’m actually pretty good at it. My stitches are neat. My tension’s solid. I’ve tackled socks, lace, different types of colourwork. All the things that make non-knitters look at you like you’ve just solved a maths equation in your head, no problem mate, done it.

The Strange Fate of Finished Objects

Here’s the thing though: I rarely wear or keep anything I make. I can knit a pair of socks that fit perfectly, and then hand them over to someone else like they’re a disposable coffee cup. Scarves, hats, mittens — they all wander off to other people’s wardrobes, while mine remains conspicuously empty of anything I’ve actually made.

The four finished items* in the photo at at the top, all completed in 2024, all about to go off to other people this month**. One will be a birthday gift for someone’s mum, another sent further north to keep a neck warm, one posted onwards to decorate the back of an armchair, and the last to a teenager who is just excited to get a handmade item.

Why Knitting Stuck (When Other Things Didn’t)

There’s something about the rhythm of it that works on my brain in a way most “self-care” activities don’t.

Running collapsed under the weight of one very soggy marathon. Journaling can be as much a way to blame myself for things, as it is a way to off load things that are eating up my mental RAM. And stretching? That’s just me having an argument with my hips***.

But knitting? Knitting sticks. Even when I put it down for months, I always pick it back up, and it always feels like coming back to something useful.

Not Quite Useful, But Definitely Mine

It doesn’t “heal” me. It doesn’t “fix” me. But it does give my restless hands something to do, and my restless mind a puzzle to chew on. There’s a similar metronome of movement that I once found in running, giving me a small pocket of quiet in my brain. It fends off the existential dread with a mantra of “knit, knit, purl.”

Not all hobbies have to be deep and meaningful. Sometimes it’s just loops of yarn and a bit of distraction, and that’s enough.

So yes, I’m self-taught, I’m good at it, and yet my drawers are mostly full of yarn waiting for it’s moment rather than finished objects… because god forbid I ever keep something nice for myself.****

*Yes, two of those finished items are crochet. Don’t be picky.

**No, I’ve not sold them. I don’t need to make money of this, and to be honest the admin of someone covering the cost of the yarn is simply not something I give a fuck about. You like the item? Great. Take it. Enjoy.

***The second child caused that hip problem. I knit them a blanket too. It was much simpler than the first one I made, but did have a cute hood.

****This is probably something I need to think more about.