CHLOE BROWNELL

there’s a specific kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too much, but from thinking too much while doing very little.

Ritual prevents the ordinary from dissolving into invisibility. If you light a candle at dinner, the meal becomes an event. If you walk at the same time each day, it becomes more than exercise. Anthropologists will tell you that rituals function as technologies of attention: certain ordinary acts aren’t trivial, they’re the architecture of meaning.