Continuous Project Altered Quarterly | June 2026
The Stabilizing Force of Ritual
Knowing my interest in and engagement with ritual in everything from my Zen study to my household routines to my business practices, a client recently sent me a copy of The disappearance of rituals by philosopher Byung-Chul Han. Han’s conception of ritual beyond its rote definition (Miriam Webster defines a ritual as: “an act or series of acts regularly repeated in a set precise manner”) put words to my intuitive perceptions, giving me a framework to talk about time with clients in ways that were previously beyond my reach and inspiring a workshop I facilitated for the Trellis Art Fund Stepping Stone grantees at their recent summer retreat. As I continue to work out these ideas, I’m compelled to share them here in hopes that these insights land with some of you the way they did for me. This is an especially lengthy edition of Continuous Project Altered Quarterly, but I know you are used to long reads from me :)
(P.S. It’s important for me to note that I only draw on passages from the first few pages of this book. What Han’s text is on the whole is a Marxist critique of neoliberal extractive racial capitalism, the attention economy, and the narcissism and disconnection arising from online culture, especially social media. I focus here only on passages from the setup for his overall exploration, which constitutes a concise and brilliant manifesto for living a full and embodied human life in community with other humans in an age of exponentially rapid global transformation.)
In passages from the text, italics are original, bold is mine:
“We can define rituals as symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable. They even make it accessible, like a house. They structure time, furnish it. …rituals [are] temporal techniques of making oneself at home in the world.” (p. 2)
Though often associated with religion, rituals take shape within every life context. Ritual is a powerful concept that can be a stabilizing force not only in spiritual life but also in civic, domestic, and work life, which is our primary focus here at Continuous Project. Rituals stabilize life (and work) by structuring time. Without them, time is amorphous and fleeting, too abstract to handle without giving it some form through repeated behaviors that, when practiced consistently enough, become rituals.
“Today, time lacks solid structure. It is not a house but an erratic stream. It disintegrates into a mere sequence of point-like presences; it rushes off. There is nothing to provide time with any hold. Time that rushes off is not habitable.” (p. 3)
One of the things I hear from almost every client I work with (and something that I experience myself) is that time can seem simultaneously scarce and overwhelming, hindering us from ever feeling satisfied. Though we know there are always 24 hours in a day, we yearn for more time, longing for the elusive states of focus and flow. But still, time rushes off, making us feel frustrated, stressed, rushed, frazzled. It’s an engagement with time that is chaotic and antagonistic, not to mention exhausting. A more amiable relationship to time is possible.
“Rituals stabilize life. …we may say: rituals are in life what things are in space. … In life, things serve as stabilizing resting points. Rituals serve the same purpose. Through their self-sameness, their repetitiveness, they stabilize life. They make life last.” (p. 3)
Designing time to be habitable, for it to endure (to “make life last,” which is to say: to feel that time is not always merely slipping away but to perceive time as something more permanent—which of course, it is!) is a way to stabilize time: to not feel that it is either scarce or overwhelming, but that it just is. Rituals allow us to actively acknowledge and mark time, to engage with, notice, and settle into time rather than passively watching it rush off. Through this engagement, time endures.
“Forms of ritual, such as manners, make possible both beautiful behaviour among humans and a beautiful, gentle treatment of things. In a ritual context things are not consumed or used up but used. … Under the compulsion of production, by contrast, we behave towards things, even towards the world, as consumers rather than as users. In return, they consume us. Relentless consumption surrounds us with disappearance, thus destabilizing life. Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things.” (p. 4)
Extending Han’s thesis, it’s possible to assert that under the compulsion of production, we behave towards time as consumers rather than as users. In return, it consumes us. Relentless consumption surrounds us with disappearance (where does the time go… , time flies, the cult of “busy,” etc.), thus destabilizing life. Ritual practices ensure that we treat time in beautiful ways and that there is an affinity between us and time.
Han suggests that buildings, rooms, and things ground us in the ungraspable vastness of space and that rituals ground us in the unknowable infinity of time, both of which are aesthetic opportunities: Rituals give form to that which is otherwise formless. He proposes that ritual helps us approach space, time, and relationships in beautiful ways, thus stabilizing life amid not only the inevitability of mortality but also a set of socioeconomic, media, and corporate circumstances that are not only ugly (or at least anti-aesthetic) but also run us ragged and leave us perpetually unfulfilled.
Identifying, establishing (or refining), and following rituals that organize time and energy into symbolic containers for creative work and the parallel practice of bringing it into public view is a way to befriend time and the tasks we perform within it. It’s not possible to add more hours to the day, but it is possible to recalibrate our relationship to time when it becomes dysregulated, a recalibration that leads to a perception of time as more expansive, generous, capacious—friendly.
Time and energy are intricately connected in a dynamic relationship that yields more or less capacity for our activities depending on all kinds of variables. Rituals can help us shift away from our approach to time as something to manage and instead as something to inhabit. In the same way that we design spaces to make them more appealing to us, we can also design time in accord with our energy, which can have a profound effect on the way we live and work. I’m not talking here about optimization, which often denies the humanity of everyday life and would completely miss the point Han is getting across in his text. I’m suggesting that it’s possible to shift our focus away from hypercapitalist extractive notions of productivity and onto the ways that the tasks of everyday life and work are deeply human and relational, and can keep us connected to ourselves, each other, culture, and environment, connections that are critical for fulfillment, sustainability, resilience, and longevity in our life’s work. Ritual is a pathway to this affinity.
I’ll leave it there for now and also offer out the TIME DESIGN and ENERGY RENEWAL workbooks I share with most of my clients. They outline tools for shifting your relationship with time, or establishing or refining rituals in your parallel practice (or your life more broadly).
