We recently discussed habits, the forming of habits, the growing of habits, but today I’d like to make an interesting distinction not many folks focus on: habit vs ritual.
This is an especially intriguing concept to discuss because dogs are highly ritualistic beings, yet dog trainers focus on habit formation, rather than ritual attraction. Of course it’s yet another example of how humans do not really understand the dogs they claim to love, and in the case of dog trainers, claim to know.
The first step is to understand that for dogs there is no past or future… everything is now. Life exists only in this moment, time is only the feeling of a particular desire having gotten stronger over time of being yet-unsatisfied.
For dogs, because all life exists purely in the “now”, the importance of everything is high. Everything matters. Everything has meaning. If something is loved, it is loved fully. If something is hated, it is hated fully.
What we may see as habits in dogs are really rituals, because the actions hold great meaning for dogs. When a dog turns in circles three times before lying down, this is not just some biological necessity he can’t ignore, but an action that converts that bed of grass into a temple.
Trainers confuse all their dog training as leveraging biological necessities of dogs. A dog needs shelter, food, status, love, and therefore the trainer metes it out in a controlled tit-for-tat fashion. And of course this works in terms of getting the dog to obey the trainer, but it is, in a sense, a way of making dogs pray to a god not their own.
The reason this confusion happens is because we as humans, because we look into the future and learn from the past, come up with habits that may bring some benefit to our lives, but don’t have meaning. We may decide to lose weight by next spring, and therefore we’ll begin to change our eating habits today, and tomorrow, and for as long as we can until it’s either a habit, or the goal of lost weight has been reached.
A ritual is a type of habit, except that it is something looked forward to because it holds significant meaning in and of itself. A funny thing about rituals is that, to an outside observer, they may appear benign, pointless, and trivial. The lighting of a candle every week. The placing of flowers in the park every morning. The singing of a song every evening. Taken only at face value, these are actions that have very little purpose, they don’t serve some larger, long-term measurable goal.
And that’s the “trick” about rituals; that they seem silly and pointless, and to an outside observer “just a weird habit”. Yet when you look inside the heart of each person during the ritual, a different story is revealed.
The person who lights the candle every week uses that moment to let the world fade away and boil down to a single point of focus, a single flame, to quiet her mind, to let the simple dancing flame massage her soul. It is the time each week she can forget all the stresses and fears and conflicts in her life, forget all she’s working towards or given up on, and just reconnect with her center in some way, and find some moments of peace.
The person who puts flowers in the park each morning is doing this at the site of the last conversation he had with a long-lost friend or family member.
The person who sings the same song every night isn’t practicing for some performance; he’s simply singing a song of gratitude for another day of life, expressing his thanks through song.
For us humans, rituals are peppered among a bed of habits, so it is understandable that we may misperceive the repeated actions of dogs as mere biological habit, rather than deeply engrained ritual. Yet that is what goes on for dogs; there is deep meaning in every moment of their lives.
Humans have always marveled at the “simple joy” dogs can take in the world, and have been inspired to happiness and simplicity by their dogs’ happiness. But what can be a greater path is for humans to become inspired by dogs’ constant sense of meaning… not purpose… meaning. There is nothing which a dog does to simply pass the time, because time never passes. Now is always now, and it is always the most important moment ever.
Captain’s Log: July 3, 2010, 8:40 am
Year #32, Month #396, Week #1,718, Day #12,024
89th Corridor, West Dog Island
