Rites Quotidiens ~ Rituals of Every Day Life

So right now I'm reading French Women Don't Get Fat. So far I am really enjoying the book. All the things she says about weight gain/loss make sense to me. Some of them make weight loss sound sooooo easy. Things like eating more fruits and vegetables, exercising (not like a mad man or woman, but sensibly (20 minutes a day)), staying away from processed foods and enjoying the things we love like bread, baked goods and chocolate in small portions; just enough to satisfy.

One of her chapters talks about rituals and I'd like to share a bit of it with you.

Saint-Exupery's Let Petit Prince is a book all French people know ell. It can be read in an hour but is packed with timeless wisdom. In Le Petit Prince, the fox explains to the little prince, "Il faut des rites" ("We need rituals"). As the French know well, ritual is how we give meaning to different aspects of being alive, including the most elemental: birth, marriage, death and through it all, until the end eating. There are, of course, holiday rituals, like the galette des rois eaten on the twelfth night of Christmas to commemorate the three kings. But there are also rites quotidiens, the rituals of everyday life by which a civilization defines itself, like le pain quotidien, our daily bread, or even brushing our teeth. Whether aware of it or not, we spend  most of our wakening hours performing our daily rituals.

In a world in which everything continues to change ever faster, these rituals are a frame of reference as well as a source of comfort and reassurance. They are also key to our well-being, part of our cultural programming about what is right and good, the norms around which we form our own tastes. Americans have some superb gastronomic rituals. . . .

And . . .The French enjoy eating out in a special way, knowing that what they savor today may never again appear on the menu. they treat every meal as something special, and this is what you must learn to do.

What about your other rituals?  Do you meditate? How do your prepare your meditation space? Do you use sage to smudge your office, room or home? Do you cut the ends of the roast off because that is how your mom, aunt, grandma did it (not for any specific reason; but because it was the only way it would fit in the pan when grandma cooked it)?

This post is part of the Ultimate Blog Challenge. I am going to really get this blog going. So I decided I'd join the Challenge. The goal of the challenge is to post 31 posts in the month of January and to get more traffic to my blog and to other blogs. This is post number 13. For more info or to join the challenge check the link below.