Habits Don’t Ache When You Skip Them – But Rituals Do
There’s a moment, if you’ve ever lit a candle with intention, when something in your chest changes before the flame catches. Your shoulders drop. Your breath finds a slower gear. You haven’t done anything yet. You’ve just struck the match. That moment is the whole thing. What ritual actually does — mechanically, neurologically, historically — and why losing it cost us more than we realized.