THE RITUALS SHAPE US

If you think back on your life, what are the things that have formed you to be the person you are today?

Many answers may jump to mind, often in the form of people or relationships: A certain mentor? An important childhood friendship? Maybe a professor you studied under?

All of these are important and true. I can think of many answers in the vein of all the examples I mentioned above. But how many of you would have pinpointed traditions and rituals?

Experiences, not just the people, shape us

What about the annual fishing trip you took with your dad – not just him, but the feel of hook-through-bait, and salty air? What about the summers on the farm with gran and grampa – the smell of manure or the sound of roosters, grans cooking, so different from your mom's? What about the ritual of sitting at the table every night for a family dinner, the feeling of "full" when your dad made you finish what was on your plate?

But what about me?

If you ask me which rituals formed me I would say the way my family celebrated Christmas and Easter. It was the sensory aesthetics of these rituals, more than any other, that shaped my faith – the spinal column of my entire experience of being a being. (Now this is not an article about my Christian faith. My intention here is not to subtly share it in the hope of proselyting the reader. Forgive me if that's what it feels like I am doing, it is not. My reason for sharing is because the season of Easter, and the fresh memories I have of this past weekend, are a great example of an important way to think about how humans are shaped, even at work. )

Easter tastes like horseradish, not chocolate.

I said to my father yesterday, that to me "Easter tastes more like horseradish, than chocolate."

As a child I was always confused when someone would talk about Easter as if it was "on Sunday" ... I was like ..."Easter starts on bedikat chametz... doesn't it?"... (We always used to celebrate bedikat chametz on the Wednesday before Good Friday.)

That annual sensory experience is deeply embedded in my memory: crawling around the lounge floor, in the dark – armed only with a candle, a feather, and a wooden spoon – in search of little pieces of bread to clean up. I won't explain the symbolism behind the ritual, you can google it if you're interested.

For me, Easter was a combination of all sorts of these tangible and tactile rituals that engaged my senses – making the celebration so much more than just an experience on Sunday, or simply, as is the case for many, ... just chocolate.

The Easter highlight for me as a child was not Easter eggs, it was celebrating a Christian form of the Jewish Passover meal on the Thursday before Good Friday. Doing this, year in and year out, as a child is one of the deeply important rituals that shaped me. The combination of candles, the Seder Platter with its Matzah, horseradish and haroset, a boiled egg in salt water, parsley, a lamb shank, passing around a communal cup, hearing the set prayers that my father repeated every year, his intonation the same each time... these are the tastes and sights and sounds and smells of Easter, for me.

Sensory Aestheticity

It is our traditions that shape us. But not the ideas in the traditions – rather, their "sensory aestheticity."

(Yes, I do know I just made up a word. That's one of the things I do ;)

"Sensory", is simple to understand. As in, "having to do with the senses: sight, sound, smell, hearing, touch, etc."

The word "Aesthetics" might be a little more difficult for us to explain. Most of us will have a passable understanding of it, and will generally follow what is meant when we hear it used. But when pressed to explain what the word means we might fumble around a little. We might have what Yale researchers Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil call "the illusion of explanatory depth."

We might understand "aesthetic" to simply mean "the visuals of something," or "the style of those visuals." Often the word is associated with "the beauty of a thing."

So, when the reader in this instance encounters me joining the word "sensory, to the word "aesthetic" and then makes up a version of that second word –aestheticity – it would be completely appropriate to be confused and wonder what the heck I am talking about. ??

That's a great place to be, so long as you keep reading ??.

I think a better way to understand the idea of aesthetics is through another word that we probably have a more explainable understanding of – Anaesthetic. (This is not my idea, and I have no idea where I first heard it, but much has been written about the relationship between the concepts of aesthetic and anaesthetic)

Aesthetic vs Anaesthetic

We all have some kind of experience with what an anaesthetic does, either from ourselves or someone we know. When we need an operation or perhaps just a visit to the dentist, the doctor may administer an anaesthetic to numb our nerves. To shut down our senses, so we don't feel the pain. With enough of it we will be completely knocked out and completely unaware of what is even happening to our bodies. This is what an anaesthetic does to us.

But the word Anaesthetic is simply the would Aesthetic, with a prefix – the Greek negating prefix "an-" in front of it.

A prefix changes everything

This prefix is a classic Greek way of making a word mean its opposite. Literally, it could be described as meaning "not". The "an-" prefix is actually a variant of the "a-" prefix, used whenever a word starts with a vowel. We see these prefixes in words like "Athiest" (someone who does not believe in God), which is the opposite of "Theist" (someone who does). We also see it in symptomatic and asymptomatic. Or in its "an-" form, a word like "anachronism" which means "not in line with the chronology of something."

So starting with our better and more easily explainable understanding of anaesthetic, we can work back to the opposite of anaesthetic, which means to be fully awake and alert, all our senses firing – nerves producing data that help us to experience the phenomena around us. With this understanding, we can appreciate that the word aesthetic can encompass so much more than just what we see. After all, I don't lose my sight when the dentist numbs my gum.

So, in this article when I use the word Aesthetic, and turn it into the variant "aestheticity" I mean that there can be an aesthetic-ness to the rituals we have – they can have aestheticity.

Do your rituals engage your senses? Because it is our senses, not our intellect, that is closer to the heart of our experience of being human, and being shaped into certain ways of thinking and being.

I think, therefore I am

Ever since René Descartes in the 17th century coined the term "cogito ergo sum" ... (I think, therefore I am), we have been led to believe that our thinking defines us. But the Age of Rationalism shouldered on Descartes himself, opens up a range of pitfalls for us in our experience of being human, leading us to believe that our thinking is at the core of the human experience and that the physicality and aestheticity of our experiences do not matter as much. I think this is a deeply flawed way of understanding the human person.

I stink, therefore I am

The other day my wife Debbie asked me if I had put on deo that morning... I am sure you know what she was trying to say. I joked with her that I would like to design a t-shirt with the words "I stink, therefore I am." She looked at me blankly then said ... "You wouldn't wear that in public, would you?"

I replied.... "well, it could be a gym shirt" ...

To which she replied, "...You don't go to the gym..."

(Perhaps if she had studied philosophy she would have found it funnier. ??)

The joke contains the truth

Now as disgusting as the idea may be to the reader, the deeper point I was humorously trying to make is that it really is my body odour, much more than my ability to think, that communicates that I exist! That I am here! I am a physical being, sharing space (and air, unfortunately) with another human being.

Make your own work connections

As I think about the recent Easter experience that my family has just shared, I am reminded that these are not spiritual truths I am writing about here, they are human truths. And until we can engage the senses of our employees and colleagues, we will have a thinner work culture and collective organisational identity.

Even though the bulk of this article has been around personal experiences, these have all been in service of laying a foundation on which my readers will hopefully be able to infer some applications to take into the working world.

We don't only have human relationships in private. We have them at work too. It is not only our families that act as contexts within which we are formed – we are shaped at work too. And as we are shaped, it is usually in a collective experience that shapes others too and creates a culture as a by-product.

Shaping a person and a culture are two sides of the same coin.

The business use cases of this idea that sensorilly aesthetic rituals shape us, are numerous. Whether it's about the difference between the "values on the poster on the wall" and the physically lived-out behaviours of the team members; or whether it is about the actual practices shared with your colleagues, like eating together, having drinks on a Friday afternoon, or organising that annual company fun-run, instead of a just agreeing that a company motto or mission statement is what defines the business.

Whatever the implications are in your context, I think the point I am trying to make is that it is the degree of "sensory aestheticity" of the ritualised expressions in your work context that will determine the extent to which the group forms an identity and a shared memory of what it means to be a part of the team.

At Mygrow we have all sorts of sensory expressions of aesthetics in our rituals that I believe define us. We eat together, we play Bananagrams – scrabble tiles scattered over the communal table – voices shouting "PEEL!" and arms reaching across the chaos to grab the last remaining tiles. Laughter increases as the speed intensifies – a deeply sensory experience. Or we answer questions from a question jar, sharing our stories and opinions with colleagues – also a deeply aesthetic experience: as I type this I can feel the sensation of fingers blindly sifting through bits of paper to pick one question from the jar. We have pancake mornings at special points in the operational calendar. We get out into nature as a team, much more regularly than other businesses. We use our office as "place", not just "space". And each of these things has taken root in our collective subconscious – the culture we share.

How can you bring some more "aestheticity" into the experience of working with the people you work with?

I am more than happy to brainstorm some ideas with you if you'd like to set up a 15-minute virtual coffee.

DM me here on LinkedIn if you'd like a sounding board (if we do it on Zoom there will be less chance of you needing to ask me what my wife did, and you will have the benefit of me as a thinking partner, instead of a stinking one ??.)

Theran is the Chief Humanising Officer for Mygrow, the Emotional
Intelligence Platform. At Mygrow we care about helping people be
better, and seeing companies grow. We want to build an Emotionally Intelligent world. Feel free to reach out to us if you
are interested in finding out how we can help you create "The team you always wanted." Visit www.mygrow.me or email us at [email protected]