Stillness Is the Key by Ryan Holiday

Done enough times, done with sincerity and feeling, routine
becomes ritual. The regularity of it—the daily cadence—creates deep
and meaningful experience. To one person, taking care of a horse is a
chore. To Simón Bolívar it was a sacred, essential part of his day.
When the body is busy with the familiar, the mind can relax. The
monotony becomes muscle memory. To deviate seems dangerous,
wrong. As if it’s inviting failure in.
Some might sneer at this “superstitious” behavior, but that is the
wrong way to think about it. As Rafael Nadal explained, “If it were
superstition, why would I keep doing the same thing over and over
whether I win or lose? It’s a way of placing myself in a match,
ordering my surroundings to match the order I seek in my head.” Did
the Greeks really believe that the oracle of Delphi could tell them
what they should do? Or was the consultation process, the journey to
Mount Parnassus, the whole point?
Sociologists found that island tribes were more prone to create
rituals for activities where luck was a factor than where it wasn’t,
such as fishing on the open sea compared to on a lagoon. The truth
is, luck is always in play for us. Luck is always a factor.
The purpose of ritual isn’t to win the gods over to our side
(though that can’t hurt!). It’s to settle our bodies (and our minds)
down when Fortune is our opponent on the other side of the net.
Most people wake up to face the day as an endless barrage of
bewildering and overwhelming choices, one right after another.
What do I wear? What should I eat? What should I do first? What
should I do after that? What sort of work should I do? Should I
scramble to address this problem or rush to put out this fire?
Needless to say, this is exhausting. It is a whirlwind of conflicting
impulses, incentives, inclinations, and external interruptions. It is no
path to stillness and hardly a way to get the best out of yourself.
The psychologist William James spoke about making habits our
ally instead of our enemy. That we can build around us a day and a
life that is moral and ordered and still—and in so doing, create a kind
of bulwark against the chaos of the world and free up the best of
ourselves for the work we do.