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We’re not Reconstructionist Jews, but I’ve always appreciated the existence of Ritualwell, which is a site that provides ritual ideas (both from the staff and user-generated) to fill in the gaps.  There aren’t really rituals formally in place in Judaism for things such as infertility or miscarriage.  But that site helps create “deliberate action performed in a set sequence that improves our emotional state, by reframing an experience in a way that feels meaningful.”  You know, ritual.

Ritual Design Lab is doing the same thing for the secular.  It’s creating rituals for people who don’t follow a religion but want to tap into an action that makes a person feel better.  And they’re using design to make it happen since, like design, ritual and objects are both created with the user in mind.  They’re also using established religion and making it easier to access those rituals.  That article in The Atlantic muses that “For a person who’s walked away from institutionalized religion, it may be psychologically easier to join the National Day of Unplugging than to observe the Sabbath, the original 24-hour digital detox.”  Though the article also points out the dangers of separating the ritual from the religion.

I thought it was interesting; the idea of taking a life situation problem and approaching it like a designer.  What can you do to make a ritual more usable?  What can you do to adapt ritual so it takes into account the user today vs. the user of yesteryear?  I’m not big on change, but I also think that we sometimes hit a point where a ritual no longer fits the current population.  And then, perhaps, it’s time to change the ritual instead of expecting people to move backwards to meet the ritual.

What do you think?

A few weeks ago, I read about a Dutch doctor who is using therapy and medication to erase people’s fears.  It sounds a little too-good-to-be true, but even the New York Times has written about her work.  She shows the person the thing they fear and gives them the beta blocker propranolol immediately after.  Their brain rewrites the fear with a new, neutral memory.

I am deeply interested in trying this.

I think it would work both because it works and because I want it to work.  It would be so much nicer to live my life without fears.  I have a bunch, most of them irrational.  My life would be better if I didn’t have them, though I’m not sure how to get rid of some of them because they’re not objects or animals.  They’re possibilities.  How do you undo a fear of a possible future event?

Something in one of the articles gave me pause: “Some people feel a sadness after they’re cured,” Kindt warns me. “A part of you is gone — even though the phobia was unpleasant, it was part of who you were.”

I don’t think I would be sad to lose my fears, though I guess I wouldn’t know until I was sad.  Though the New York Times article points out that you’re still you and you still have your memories: “The subjects knew perfectly well after the study that they previously feared spiders and that they now — strangely — felt little to no anxiety around them.”

I’m not seeing the drawbacks as long as your memory is intact and you’re not erasing a helpful fear.  But maybe I just haven’t thought deeply enough about the consequences of this because I’m so enamoured with the possibilities.

If you were given the chance to do this and permanently get rid of an on-going fear, would you take it?

I sometimes bookmark things that I know I’m going to love and save them to read when I can fully concentrate.  Which is why I only read this essay about miscarriage in Catapult months after it was posted.  It’s a hard read.  I still think you should read it.

It begins with her second loss, back pedaling to frame this second miscarriage through the lens of the first one.  She writes, “How do we begin to hope when hope has wrought crushing disappointment in our lives?”  How do you continue to believe it will happen for you when you’ve received so much evidence to the contrary?  Or, “I thought how unfair it was that that bedspread had outlived our child, and some but not all of my hope died, like depleting power in a video game.”  We have hope until it’s all drained away.  And then it’s game over.

The essay doesn’t have a neat ending.  She is pregnant and the baby is probably here by now, though there is no neat wrap up to her words, no relief that it all worked out.  This is about the actual cost of hope, what it means to hope, why we sometimes protect ourselves from hope.  Like I said, a hard read.  But I still think you should read it.

There is nothing good about the two week wait.  It’s Schrödinger’s pregnancy; you are and you aren’t, and waiting to know is agony.

I think that interaction with waiting created other negative feelings about waiting that have bled into the rest of my life.  I’m not a big fan of inaction.  I want to do things now.  I want to know answers now.  I tend to address things and take care of things immediately.  I do not like to waste time.

Tiny Buddha had an essay about the power of waiting that begins with this thought, “Waiting has a bad rap in modern Western society.”  We’re more seize the day, “gather ye rosebuds while ye may” sorts of people.

The author states: “I really didn’t know much about waiting. I thought it was something you did if you didn’t have courage or conviction. It was just an excuse not to take action. I know better now … The mind hates uncertainty, and would rather make a mistake than simply live in a state of ‘not knowing’ while the right course unfolds.”

It’s a hard concept to wrap your brain around; waiting instead of doing.  Believing that it’s okay to hold back; that you’ll end up where you want to if you do.  It is the exact opposite of what is ingrained through infertility: Start now.  Continue even if you’re exhausted.  Time is of the essence.

And maybe some of that is true with family building.  Time isn’t your friend.  But holding onto that idea and bringing it into the rest of my life maybe isn’t the best course of action.  This essay gave me a lot of food for thought.

Do you think the two week wait influenced your relationship with waiting?

I love libraries.  I got married in a library.  I walked down the middle aisle between the stacks on either side.

I visit my library regularly.  I go at least once a week to return or grab books, but I also go on bad days when I need to clear my head for a few minutes.  I just like being near books, even if I don’t take any home with me.

So I wholeheartedly love this idea of being a library tourist and visiting libraries around the world.  We like taking the kids to popular libraries — tourist destination libraries — but I also really love going into small, local libraries.  I usually like the small, local libraries more because the librarians talk to you and you get a sense of the area.  This would be your library if you lived there.

Do you visit libraries in places you visit?