Why Rituals Matter More Than You Know, And How to Design Your Own | Bruce Feiler

There is a particular kind of loneliness that hits in the middle of a full life. 

Not because you are isolated. Because the relationships that used to hold you steady are all being renegotiated at once. Your kids have left. A parent has died. A marriage needs new terms. A friendship has frayed. And the cultural rituals that once helped people move through moments like this are mostly gone.

Bruce Feiler has spent the last three years traveling to 26 countries, attending over 100 ceremonies, and interviewing hundreds of people to understand what happens when we stop gathering in intentional ways. He’s a seven-time New York Times bestselling author and the creator of the LifeQuakes framework. His new book, A Time to Gather, makes the case that we are living through both a celebration recession and a ritual renaissance at the same time.

In this conversation, Bruce and Jonathan explore what it actually means to feel homesick in your own home, why the four traditional life rituals no longer match the lives most of us are actually living, and what it looks like to design a ritual from scratch when the ones you inherited don’t fit.

What you’ll explore in this conversation:

Why 5,000 Civil War soldiers were officially diagnosed as dying of homesickness, and what that history reveals about the longing you feel now The five building blocks of any ritual, from drawing the circle to creating a web of hope, and how to use them to mark a moment that matters Why Bruce calls this a celebration recession: what we stopped doing, when, and what’s quietly replacing it The live ritual Bruce helps Jonathan design in real time, walking through every step from welcome to close Why rituals are not just for grief and weddings, and the new ceremonies people are creating for divorce, mastectomies, miscarriages, sobriety, and career endings

If you have ever felt the ground shift under you and not known how to steady yourself with the people you love most, this is the conversation for it.

You can find Bruce at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Next week, we’re sharing our conversation with Stanford professor Tina Seelig to talk about something most of us have completely backwards: how luck actually works, and why most of what we call luck is the result of deliberate actions hiding in plain sight. If you have ever wondered why some people seem to catch every break while others keep missing them, this is going to change the way you see that. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss any upcoming episodes!

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photo credit: Jonica Moore

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Episode Transcript:

Bruce Feiler: [00:00:00] A ritual is a shared, unnecessary act that makes us feel at home. It’s the glue that holds society together. I’ve started calling it the original human algorithm. It’s a mechanism by which the group tends itself.

Jonathan Fields: [00:00:13] So there’s a particular kind of loneliness that tends to hit in the middle of a full life, not because you’re isolated, but because the relationships that used to hold you steady, they’re just all being renegotiated often all at once. The kids have left, a parent has passed. A marriage needs new terms. We need ways to process these moments, rituals. And yet the very rituals that help people move through moments like this for 10,000 years have largely vanished and very little has replaced them. Bruce Feiler is a seven time New York Times best selling author. In this conversation, he walks us through why rituals matter and how to design your own rituals for the moments that no existing ceremony really knows how to hold anymore. I’m Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project. And the place I want to start with, Bruce, is a feeling that he described that I never heard named quite the way that he names it before. We’ll jump right in after this short break.

Jonathan Fields: [00:01:15] You and I have talked a number of times over the years. You spent about three years or so visiting, if I remember correctly, 26 different countries participating in 100 or something different ceremonies. But I want to start a little bit closer to home. In the introduction of A Time Together, you write about walking through your own front door after dropping your daughters off at college and feeling, I think these are kind of your words, homesick in your own home. And it’s like I knew exactly what you meant. Um, even though my circumstances are different, everyone joining us is going to have a different circumstance. What is the thing that you discovered in those first few weeks that made you realize, oh, this is the feeling. And this also is not a private problem or feeling. This is something much bigger that’s happening. Um, we’ve just maybe been calling it by the wrong name.

Bruce Feiler: [00:02:11] Well, I appreciate this question. And this is where it started for me. I mean, to sort of go back a little bit, my wife Linda, and I went from empty nest to full nest in 32 minutes. 21 years ago, when we became the parent of identical twin daughters. And 18 years later, we had the inverse happen. We went from full nest to empty nest. When we dropped them off at different sides of the same college campus, and we drove back to Brooklyn Heights, where we live. And I walked through the front door, as you say, and I felt and it was so distinct, Jonathan. Like this was the feeling like I wasn’t searching for the right word. Right? You know, I’m that kind of person. Like, what am I? I knew it right away. I felt homesick in my own home, and my initial instinct was, don’t tell anybody about this. Like that is not an acceptable word to use in public discourse. You know, in this day and age, like that’s what a child feels when they go on their first sleepover or what an adolescent feels the, you know, the opening days or weeks of, of, of sleepaway camp. Um, but that’s what I felt. And it wasn’t just my children. Like my dad had just died. My mother was aging there. Had I had some conflict with my siblings. My marriage needs to be renegotiated at this point and my friendships need to be remade. And my initial thought was, oh, I’m ready for this. I mean, you and I met six years ago, as I recall, when I published Life Is in the Transitions, and I have spent most of the last decade collecting and analyzing life stories of now 500 Americans all across the country, every circumstance and walk of life.

Bruce Feiler: [00:03:49] And I wrote a book on this topic called life is in the transitions. I gave a Ted talk. I teach a Ted course, I’m like, oh, I’m the like transition guy. Like, I should be ready for this moment. And what I realized was that those events that I had spent so much of my life thinking and talking about, I call them life quakes because some of them are involuntary, like losing a loved one or losing your legs, or a downsizing or a pandemic. But some of them are voluntary, like starting over or having children, for example. Right? You know, it was joyful, but it was a life quake, right? Two kids in 32 minutes. The difference is that this was not a life quake. This was a group. Group quake, if you will. Like it felt like all the relationships in my life had been frayed and needed to be remade. Right. And so that is the thing that I began to hear, that everybody had this kind of craving or longing, right? This we’re coming out of the pandemic. There’s digital saturation, there’s loneliness. We’re, you know, we’re almost a generation into. We’ve heard about loneliness a lot. Where are the solutions? There must be something out there. And so that’s when I realized, oh, I need a ritual. Like I need some call to reconnect with people. At which point I basically stumble into what I think of as like, the greatest story I’ve encountered in nearly four decades of doing this kind of work professionally.

Jonathan Fields: [00:05:16] Homesickness, then home. It’s an interesting word for what you just described, because when you talk about homesickness as a sort of a condition, you’re not using it in the way that most of us would use it or have thought about using it. Um, how is it different than what things, you know, what people describe in 30s, 40s, 50s calling things like empty nest, mid-life crisis, just being tired after so many years. How is this different?

Bruce Feiler: [00:05:43] So I think there’s two ways of answering this question. Let me start with the second first, which is that it turns out actually like, I kind of love this idea of geeking out on this with you. That homesickness actually has a huge and long history, like the term was essentially coined in the 18th, uh, 18th century. Right. George Washington complained that a lot of the soldiers fighting during the Revolutionary War experienced homesickness. Right. So you have all the, you know, and a lot of ways America is built on the idea of leaving one home and going to a another home. It becomes a medical condition. Actually, in the 19th century, 5000 people in the Civil War were diagnosed as having died of homesickness. Right. So it turns out there is this robust history. The difference is. So then what happens, of course, is then transportation arises and homesickness. Homesickness evolves in the 20th century from a place associated with physical places to an idea associated kind of with a time. Right? So I remember when we did this little ritual, um, you know, we’ll obviously get to this in a second, but we did this ritual when we took our girls the night before we took them to college, and it turned out that they were more upset about the end of their childhood than they were about the, the, the idea of entering their young adulthood. And I think that’s what we felt in a lot of parents feel about, oh, kind of more upset about the end of the every day kind of parenting dynamic as opposed to unease. And, and so the reason to now get to the other question you asked me, the reason that mine went to ritual was ritual is there’s this sort of paradox at the heart of this whole project, right? And the first element of it is that ritual works like it’s one of the few things that we know holds groups, families together.

Bruce Feiler: [00:07:37] We have 300,000 years of evidence. The first thing that humans did before we were anatomical human was get together and bury our dead and mark that passage. So for thousands of years, for thousands of centuries, whenever there’s been an instability in the group, the group turns to ritual. What I mean by instability, someone comes into the group a baby or a wedding. Someone leaves the group like a coming of age, like a death. Someone moves, gets sick, you know, changes what they do. The group has now this group, because I was just calling it, it has this source of instability. I remember when my dad died in 2021, there was this sense of, oh, right. He performed a lot of roles in this group. And the group now needs to reassign those roles in a lot of ways. And that’s what the ritual does. It is kind of it’s the elemental human act. It’s the glue that holds society together. It’s, you know, I’ve started calling it the original human algorithm. It’s a mechanism by which the group tends itself. And that, I think, is the connection with homesickness. We have this longing, but we’re kind of frozen. So that’s beat one of of the paradox. The second paradox is that the rituals we’ve used for all these centuries, we’ve turned our backs on them.

Bruce Feiler: [00:08:56] Right. So no one’s holding birth rituals or coming of age rituals. In 1960, 90% of American adults got married. Right now, fewer than 50% are married in 19. And no one’s having funerals anymore. This was shocking to me. In 1970, five, percent of Americans were cremated. Now it’s 65% going to 80%. And only one in 1 in 4 has a ceremony of any kind. And only 1 in 5 is buried. Only a third of us are buried anymore, so we’re not even having we’re in what I call a celebration recession. So we are not using. It took us ten, 10,000 years to come up with this like, way to handle the group, the kind of mechanism and 25 years to abandon them. Which leads to then the third side of this paradox, which is at the same time, everyday people are saying, I want new ways and new excuses to connect that maybe my organized group never had. So some are new names like Celebrations of Life or Commitment ceremony. Some are, you could argue silly, like promposals or gender reveals. But a lot of them are profound. And there are things that people listening to us have experienced. You and I have experienced that organized religion never honored. Like not just marriage, but divorce. Not just fertility, but infertility. Not just birth, but stillbirth. So there’s this renaissance of new ways of gathering. I think it’s the greatest untold story in the world right now, where people are pushing back against digital saturation and division. And now even AI and saying, I want to connect, and I’m just going to do it on my own terms.

Jonathan Fields: [00:10:21] I want to drop into a number of what the elements of what you just said. Um, but I want to make sure I’m also really clear on what the, what the, what the dilemma is here because it sounds like what you’re describing is sort of a, an experience of relational dislocation. The relationships that used to anchor us are getting renegotiated at the same time, like everything all at the same time and the feeling that it produces, um, is, is, is us just being wildly unmoored. Um, you could say homesickness. Um, even when you’re sitting in your own kitchen, you could describe it as just feeling like you’re, I mean, to me, it feels like there’s the, there’s no ground beneath my feet anymore. And then you invite us to, to say, well, there’s this thing called ritual. Um, and these things have been around from time immemorial and they speak to this feeling in a really powerful way. But maybe the rituals that got us here aren’t the ones that are going to get us there.

Bruce Feiler: [00:11:22] The problem that we’re talking about people solving is the craving for human connection. Okay, so there is widespread recognition that we have relinquished a lot of the natural fiber fabric and frankly, human calendar of how we connect to corporations, algorithms, whatever you want to call it. People feel that, and they have felt that for a long time. And so the, the, what, what’s happening is we’re letting go or we’ve abandoned the old ways of doing this. I used to talk about this when I wrote my book, The Secrets of Happy Families. Like the old rules no longer apply. But the new rules haven’t been written. And what’s interesting, and I think, frankly, inspiring about what’s happening, is the old rules were top down, institutionally mandated, hierarchical. You could argue, you could argue patriarchal pre-scripted. Okay, here are the things you’re going to do in the course of your life. This is the script you’re going to follow. Dearly beloved, you know, don’t do anything. Follow the rules. And that nobody wants that anymore. So what’s happening is there’s this bottom up, bespoke DIY movement to make your own rituals. Let me try to put some, you know, give you an example of this. Okay, so I talked to a young millennial ritual designer in in Brooklyn, actually. And she says she has thousands of coffees with young people. Okay. And they’re talking about things in their life that no one ever talked about.

Bruce Feiler: [00:12:55] Right. I wanted to do a certain work. I went to college. You and I both wrote books about this, right? I, I studied in college for a career I’m in like five years in that career. It turns out I don’t want that career. Now what? Okay. I want to be in a relationship. But I’ve never experienced love and I’m scared of it. My pet just died, okay? I’m having, you know, I’m drinking too much and I want to go sober, but I don’t want to. I don’t want to join this group I want. So whatever it is. And she tells me about this ritual that she does a friend of hers who has a double mastectomy. Okay, this is the kind of thing that organized religion would not have done. Uh, you know, a gathering of friends. So she invites people over and we’re going to we’re going to get together. We’ll get to this eventually. You know, these are the things that rituals do. We’re going to create sacred space. We’re going to throw empathy, show empathy. Everybody brings comfortable clothing because it’s all involved. Lots of pipes and drains, right? When you have these kinds of surgeries, I’m speaking here as a cancer survivor myself. Um, and she says to me that the fundamental thing that she’s listening for is the deepest fear and the highest hope and the purpose of the gathering, and you can call it what you want.

Bruce Feiler: [00:14:04] You can call it a ritual, a gathering, a ceremony, a celebration. She’s listening for the deepest fear and the highest hope. And the purpose of the gathering is to turn the fear into hope. And what she said is, my generation, we want these gatherings. We want them when we want them. We don’t need our parent’s permission, and we don’t need our institutions to approve them. We’re just going to do them because it’s what we are experiencing. And that’s this renaissance of things. Cancerversary sober versary daddy daughter dances, proms. I mean, you can go on and on and on of these are gotcha ceremonies for when you adopt a child. Um, adoption reunion families for people who gave up their children. All of these occasions and in the new non-linear lives that we live, we crave these much more frequently than when Arnold van Gennep invented the phrase rites of passage in 1909. People are saying, I want it now, and I want it on my terms, but they’re scared. And so what I’m trying to offer in this book is kind of a simple blueprint for how, you know, I think of it as a kind of blueprint for humans together, a set of things you can do right now to create these kinds of moments in your own families.

Jonathan Fields: [00:15:14] Yeah. I mean, what you’re describing is really interesting because, you know, I think if we think about the rituals that many of us have experienced in our lives, if we look back over time, well, you kind of define them as like the big four, right? You know, there’s one for birth, there’s one for reaching adulthood, there’s one for partnership or marriage and there’s one for death, right? And those are based on life happening, unfolding in a fairly certain way. Um, and we’ve, we’ve outgrown that. Like, it’s not that we’ve outgrown that. The way that we live our lives have has just changed dramatically. You know, so instead of, you know, saying, well, we need these four rituals to mark the four major parts of life, you’re kind of saying life is now much more complicated. It’s not one track, it’s multi-track. It’s so many different things. And the rituals that we’ve inherited that have been handed down to us cover for things that that well, you know, at least we know two of them are going to happen in our lives. We’ll be born and we’re going to die. Um, and, you know, but what about everything else? And what about often the sadness or the loss or the fear or the angst that goes along with all of these different moments in really complex life? Now, what about rituals for them? Am I getting that right?

Bruce Feiler: [00:16:28] What’s great about this story is I’m not I’m not wagging my finger and telling you, you need to do this. This is what’s actually happening. Like, I feel like I’m chronicling this story that that is basically hiding in plain sight, right? That, that that’s really I remember the first person who read this book. My editor was like, yeah, this story has been hiding in plain sight. I mean, I wrote five books about religion. Then I wrote about transitions. I wrote, I wrote New York Times column for a decade on families. I’m a little, you know, I wrote a book called Secrets of Happy Families. I’m a little shamefaced that I didn’t really put this together. I feel like this is my job is to cover this story. And I feel, you know, I’ll give you a. I’ll give you an example. My wife, Linda. Her favorite chapter in this book is chapter three, the Taylor Swift Divorce Party. Okay, so what’s the story? The story is a woman on Long Island. She’s born, her parents got divorced, and both sets of her grandparents got divorced. She’s like her one thing in life was she was going to not get divorced. You can imagine what happened. She grows up, she gets married. She has two children. She gets divorced. Her husband takes half their belongings. The other half she gives away, she walks back in after coming back from from goodwill or wherever it was, and she realizes, oh my God, I got two kids. I don’t have sheets to sleep on. I don’t have towels to shower with.

Bruce Feiler: [00:17:39] My toothbrush holder had four holes. It’s now got only three toothbrushes in it. Every time I walk into the bathroom, I think I’m a loser for getting divorced. I need a registry. I didn’t need it when I got married. So she starts the world’s first divorce registry. It totally goes crazy. And then she realizes, you know what? It’s more than just a registry. She needs to get her friends around to to deal with it collectively. So she writes a blog post called the Taylor Swift Divorce Party that she’s going to have Shake it off cupcakes and you will never, ever, ever get back together napkins or whatever, whatever it is. And it goes crazy viral. And I said, well, why is this happening? And she says, because millennials grew up. We went online into AOL chat rooms and we started saying, my husband is doing this. You know, my spouse is doing that. Like, am I, am I like being, am I making this up? And other women will say, no, that’s happening to me. And then older women would say, oh yeah, that happened to me. But I didn’t know. I felt isolated and shamed and I didn’t want to do anything. You go sister. And so there, there is this. There’s it’s an odd thing that going on the internet, which is something, of course, that is we all, you know, malign a lot in some ways, create it empowered women in particular to get over the shame of having. She’s like, I’m not celebrating that. I am divorced, but I don’t think my life should be over either.

Bruce Feiler: [00:19:01] Right. To me, the parallel chapter very late in my book, is, is the incredible story of the shame that people felt. Uh, women in particular felt if they had a miscarriage or a stillborn child. Right. There’s not an organized religion like Judaism, of which I’m a, you know, proud member and a big advocate of, in a lot of ways modernizes the great ritual. If you the great thinker, if you die before 31 days is as it’s as if you never lived no funeral. The Catholic Church, if you were not baptized. You did not. You could not be buried in a Catholic graveyard. So for centuries, dads would take these stillborn children to the edge of town in Ireland and then bury. The whole town would go with them. They would bury them under abandoned churches in what were called eavesdrop burials, so that the water coming down the roof would surreptitiously baptize them and they could get to heaven like it was a grandmother in Oregon. I tell this incredible story in my book who said, we need a ceremony for honoring these women and has swept the country. So it’s it’s the bottom up urge that exactly the question you had of like, what is the feeling we’re solving? I feel alone and I don’t want to feel alone. And people finding new ways to connect. Exactly. In those moments, as you said, whenever it happens in your life, not on some chart you read in some undergraduate textbook as a freshman.

Jonathan Fields: [00:20:20] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. In addition to that, we’re living a lot longer these days than a lot of the rituals that were handed down to us accommodated. So it’s like we we need a lot more. I love this idea that this is a bottom up experience. Like there’s a renaissance happening where we’re not waiting around to figure out what is the right ritual for this. We’re basically saying, I’m going to just make what I need to help me through this particular moment in time. If it doesn’t exist, then it’s about to exist. We’re not waiting for institutions to deem this is the thing to do. We’re not waiting for, like, dogma that’s been passed on for generations to tell us this is how we do this thing. We’re kind of saying, this is different. I don’t see a real obvious thing that everyone does when this happens. I’m going to do it because I need it. Like it’s like there’s something that’s, that’s common in all of us that says like, in these moments, there’s something missing that I need right now in this moment, whether it’s to serve a purpose of closure or gathering or togetherness or ease, a sense of aloneness, um, there’s something I need that ritual seems to solve for. And, and what you’re describing is people are not waiting for somebody else to tell them what to do. They’re saying like, this is what I’m going to do. Um, which is, which is empowering.

Bruce Feiler: [00:21:34] And one of the reasons so, so two quick reactions to that beautiful reflection. Yes, we live twice as long. And by the way, if you don’t choose not to get married or have children, as a lot of people do, then you’re not, you’re not having a pre-approved life ritual between, you know, between 15 and death. Like that’s just not reflective of who we are. You know, my data from life is in the transitions. We, we go through a disruptor every 12 to 18 months. And 1 in 10 of those is a life quake. The average length of a life quake is five years. That means we’re spending half of our lives in transition and we need these kinds of celebrations. So part of the problem that we have, and part of what I’m trying to do in a time together is, first of all, rebrand this. So birth, coming of age, marriage, death, that doesn’t really describe it. Because part of it is, is that every ritual contains every other ritual, right? So that if you’re getting married, you’re sort of, you know, you’re saying goodbye to an old phase of life. If you’re having a, you know, certainly a first child, you’re saying goodbye. So that’s why I’ve renamed them as as welcoming, becoming loving morning and what I call the fifth ritual, the missing ritual renewing for anything that we’re doing. I mean, I know people hiring doulas for the end of life, but also doulas for birth, also doulas for shutting down a company or doulas for a job loss.

Bruce Feiler: [00:22:46] Right. That is also a mournful change, but also something that has the opportunity for, for, for, for rebirth and renewal. So that’s the first thing is that every ritual contains every other ritual, right? The second thing I think worth saying here is it’s kind of what do they do? Right. And so rituals. So let’s just, let’s just put a little bit of, of nomenclature on this. So a ritual is a shared unnecessary act that makes us feel at home. Okay, so that’s my definition. It’s an act because it’s a doing. It’s not a talking. We’re actually going to meet, do something. It’s shared. It connects us. And there are hundreds of studies that show the power. You know, our breath will go down. It will calm us. In times of change, our heartbeats will will synchronize, etc.. Um, it’s also unnecessary, right? And I think that I kind of love this, right? You don’t need to get down on one knee to get engaged. You don’t need to wear black to mourn, right? You don’t need to circle the bride six times to get married. These are things that we make necessities by infusing them with collective meaning. Like some of my great tips I heard are people like passing around rings, um, before people get married.

Bruce Feiler: [00:23:57] So everyone touches them so that by the time the couple puts the ring on, they’ve got the warmth of, of everybody. Like that’s an example. So, so, um, and finally make you feel at home and what is that? That’s calm. That’s feeling safe. That’s feeling protected. We celebrate when it’s celebratory. We mourn when it’s mournful, but we are going to reconstitute, reconstitute the sense of safety in the flux of change, which is the essence of Home wellness as opposed to homesickness. But there’s also another thing about them is before we maybe get into the, you know, tips for doing them is that a lot of people don’t want to do them because of the conflict, but they’re a big purpose of them is to resolve the conflict. You get the, you and I are getting married. You want a big wedding? I want a small wedding. You want a preacher? Okay. I want my sister in law. Okay? You want nobody up there? Just us celebrating our love. I want all my fraternity brothers. Right? So, like, the purpose of it is to get it out. I remember I mentioned my dad earlier when he died in 2021 after a long bout with Parkinson’s. Um, I fly home to Savannah. You and I were talking about Georgia before we came on the air here. And my mother says, I don’t like this custom of throwing dirt on the coffin.

Bruce Feiler: [00:25:13] Like I find it barbaric. I don’t like the noise. Um, I think we should do long stem yellow roses. My sister says the dirt’s my favorite part. Long stemmed roses is completely hallmark and I want nothing to do with it. And I’m the one on the phone with the rabbi doing the negotiating. I’m like, I think I need to call you back. At which point I attempt to kind of middle child my way through a compromise here. And I’m like to my sister, I’m like, I’m like, she lived with a guy for 65 years. You know, like she took care of him. Like if she went to like, she ought to be able to have what she had. You want this. So what do we do? We bought three dozen yellow long stemmed yellow roses, and we didn’t get dirt. But my dad loved to walk on Tybee Island, Georgia. So we got little bags of sand and we gave people a choice. And what I, what I later, when I was talking to all these ritual designers, um, realized is, uh, the ritual both surfaced the conflict and resolved the conflict in the course of it, giving us a way to kind of think, oh, my dad’s not there to solve this problem. He’s, you know, but we have to solve it. We are what’s left of the group. And the group needs to remake itself anew.

Jonathan Fields: [00:26:21] Yeah, I mean, that makes so much sense to me. And I love the fact that it sort of serves multiple purposes and often multiple people at the same time. Let’s get into the how of this. Let’s say somebody’s joining us for this conversation and they’re in a moment. Um, it’s a moment which is maybe really big for them, but maybe not so big for other people, but for them, whatever it is, a leaving a coming like, well, the five, five different categories you described above would walk you through them again.

Bruce Feiler: [00:26:47] Okay, let’s, let’s don’t do this abstractly. Let’s do a real time ritual design process for you. Jonathan Fields Okay, so tell me something. The first thing we need to do is what are, what are we marking here? Do you have someone who’s sick? Do you have something to celebrate? Do you have a kid in a milestone? Are you personally in a period of change? Let’s pick something in your life that we’re going to design a ritual in real time right now.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:09] Okay, this is kind of fun because there’s something I’ve been working on for a while now. I have alluded to here and there in conversations, but never actually just outright own that I literally just finished last week, and that is purely for the fun without any like push or like, like idea that this is something that I would ever publish. I decided a little while back that I want to try my hand at fiction, at writing a novel. Um, and for.

Bruce Feiler: [00:27:33] My fingers in that, you know, in that, in that pandemic way of showing. Yeah, yeah. Thrill. Oh my gosh. So you’ve been secretly writing a novel.

Jonathan Fields: [00:27:41] You’ve been secretly writing a novel every morning. 7:39 a.m. at the coffee shop. I’m just writing, writing, writing, writing, writing. And a week or two ago, you know, um, I, I, I, I wrote the, like the equivalent of the end. Um, again, this might end up in a drawer. This is just a really fun creative thing. So it’s not about, hey, I sold the book or anything like that, but to me, it was just like I said, I wanted to do a thing. I had never done it before. I had no idea if I could do it. It was really juicy and fun, and I learned so much about the process and just about myself and, and I did it. And it was funny because I told a couple of friends and they’re like, what are you doing now? Like, what are you doing to like, what’s the thing you’re going to do to mark it?

Bruce Feiler: [00:28:20] There you go. Look at that.

Jonathan Fields: [00:28:21] And I was, and I was like, I don’t know, like, I usually I just move on to the next thing I’m really terrible at like these moments. So this is perfect.

Bruce Feiler: [00:28:31] Okay, so what I’m hearing in this is you’ve kept it private. You’ve told a couple of people, but now just the fact that you’re sharing this into this microphone and with me and everybody listening to us, it’s now going public. Okay. And so we need to mark this threshold moment. Okay, fantastic. First of all, congratulations. I’m proud of you. Good for you. Like a lot of people I have ever put in words in a row, I’ve thought I should do this someday. So you’re inspiring everybody to do the thing? To do the thing, right? Okay, so we’re now going to we’re going to figure out we’re going to mark the thing. Okay? So we need there are five things that rituals do. I’m going to simplify this to three. But there are five things that rituals have. Okay. So number one, they have boundaries. Okay. We need an opening. Wow. We need to assemble the people into a space. Okay, so we’re going to create the space. So where are we going to do this? Where are we going to have this of the celebration of your friends and you are craving. We’re going to do it in your house. We’re going to do it in public library.

Bruce Feiler: [00:29:27] We’re going to do the top of a mountain. I see you, you know, in your social media, like outdoors. You want to go to a beach, where are we going to do this? It absolutely can be done online. It can be done in person or it can be done a combination. And so what we need is the the first of these things is the, is the um is the setting the boundary, drawing the circle, whatever it might be. And what we need is I’ve taken this line in my book opens, as you know, in a group baptism in the Vatican, the Vatican baptism liturgy has welcomed with joy. We’re going to welcome people with joy. So what is intrinsic to you to welcome people to this circle? You want to sing a song, you want to hand out flowers. You want to light a candle. I just did this at Ted last week. Two rituals of renewal. We took little flameless candles because it was an impersonal, um, A conference. When I just did this at LinkedIn, we did in person. We did flameless candles. What are we going to welcome with joy? How are we going to welcome people with joy?

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:21] Mhm. We’re going to do. Remember when you were a little kid and you had that little paper, you fold it into four little things, you kind of move it around.

Bruce Feiler: [00:30:29] Oh, like.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:30] Somebody would have to like

Bruce Feiler: [00:30:31] it’s like a.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:32] It’s like what it’s called like. And they pop it open and you get like a mystery message like that that delights you. We’re going to do that.

Bruce Feiler: [00:30:36] Okay, good. Okay. So we have a little gesture. Okay. We’re going to do that at the beginning. After that we’re going to go to number two.

Jonathan Fields: [00:30:43] Okay.

Bruce Feiler: [00:30:43] So I said we could simplify. This is all the welcome, but we’ll we’ll go back to the five just because you teed it up. And um, so the next thing we need is stakes. Why does this matter? Why is this important? Okay. The way I think about this is we’re going to define the, um tension. Identify the tension and define the intention. So we have to put our intention to something. So what is the tension. So how are we going to we did a family ritual that’s described in the conclusion of A Time to Gather, as you know. And I’m like, how are we going to have to mark my daughter’s 20th birthday? Um, we opened in Central Park because we used to drive through Central Park and everything went wrong. I was so smart. Oh my God, I was like a ritual expert. I took a blanket with us. It was the end of March and it was a white blanket. And I put my muddy feet in the middle of it. And then a dog, like everything went wrong. Um, so the stakes there was okay. Because when I was 18, my grandfather came over to my house and said, you’re 18, you’re going to sign a will. Like it was a rite of passage without a right of choice. So we had our daughters sign wills like we. So how are we going to set the intention of once everybody is inside the circle?

Jonathan Fields: [00:31:53] Hmm. Tell me more about what you mean.

Bruce Feiler: [00:31:58] What I mean is why are we here? And what are we trying to accomplish? If you think back to the double mastectomy, the woman who ran that, she’s like, we’re not here to judge. We’re not here to preach. We’re not here to tell you no. We’re just here to listen and to support. So what I think of as a great intention setting moment here would be to say something to the effect of, I’ve just had this moment and I want to celebrate with you, but perhaps all of you have just had a similar moment where you’ve completed a project.

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:29] So I like that.

Bruce Feiler: [00:32:30] Okay, so that’s what I want. Some sort of invitation. This is what I’ve learned from the designers, right? Not telling an invitation. If you’re just here to celebrate my milestone here, that’s fine. But if you have a milestone, you can also you can go around, everybody can say it or you can, you know, play a piece of music and people can think about it. But what you want there is all part of the welcome is to define the stakes that are that are before everybody.

Jonathan Fields: [00:32:59] Yeah, I love that. And I love the notion of saying like, okay, if you want to just make it about you, that’s one way to do it. But if you invite people in to say like, what is your version of this? So like, for me, if I wanted to say something like, you know, my intent is really just to, to honor and acknowledge and savor this completion of this thing. That was a big thing for me. And, you know, like, I wonder if you’re working on something or you’re close to it, or you’ve just recently completed something yourself that you might also feel like, uh, like honoring or celebrating in some way does that.

Bruce Feiler: [00:33:28] I think that’s fantastic. And now it reminds me, so let’s go to the next one, because then the next thing you need, we’re going to get to the middle. That’s all the beginning. Now we’re going to get to the middle. What you need in the middle is you need, you know, a lot of the rituals are great. They solve every problem. You know what? You know what rituals do. It’s compromise rehearsal. It forces people to make a peace plan. As we discussed earlier, I call this the for something, something old, something new, something borrowed, something new. Right? Like you need a way. So here’s what I did in Ted. That was great. Um, and I got this idea from a ritual designer named Megan Sheldon in Vancouver, which happened to be where I was. But I loved this, and I’ve now done it, and I’m doing it actually at the launch party for a time to gather. And that is. I divided everybody up into twos. Pair up with someone that you don’t that you didn’t know before you walked in. Or you, you know you’re at least you’re not married to or living with or related to or whatever it might be.

Bruce Feiler: [00:34:20] And then we passed around little cubes of bitter chocolate. Mm. And I said, I want you to share with your partner something that’s bringing you bitterness right now that you’re struggling with like a, a difficulty or a transition that you’re going through that you’re having trouble managing. And then we passed out this bitter chocolate and everybody and I made them decide when to eat it. And then we passed around sweet chocolate and we said, please identify what would be a sweet outcome for this thing that’s giving you bitterness right now. So that’s why I jumped into that because you said you may have something. So there’s something about why don’t you then a way to offer people, if it’s, you know, six, eight people, you can do it in a circle. If it’s larger, you can break it up and say, go around and share with one other person what something that you’ve been working on that maybe you haven’t. You know, we’re a new phase that you’re, that you’re going through. So something there. So tell me something that would work for the middle of this ritual as we expand it to new horizons of all kinds.

Jonathan Fields: [00:35:25] Yeah, I totally love the chocolate thing because I’m an absolute chocolate fiend. So it’s like, boom, done.

Bruce Feiler: [00:35:32] Um, okay. So then. Number four, here is empathy. We want to be with you or be with one another in this time of change. So if this is a graduation, uh, if this is an 18th birthday, if this is a pregnancy, we may be celebrating, but if this is the loss of a job, a double mastectomy, someone just had the roof of their house taken off with a tornado, whatever it might be we. We want to be with people where they are. Okay. And, um, by the way, when I started, when I started my book Happy Families, my wife said to me, okay, I got it. You’re going to bring us a bunch of ideas, but don’t bring me abstract ideas. Bring me things people have done. So everything I’m saying here are things that actual people have done. So what I did in the one I just led, that I’ve been leading in the last few months, is we then went to empathy and I took what I did at Ted was I took these flameless candles and I had these bowls. I met this guy who’s a preacher who told me that at, at New Human Namings that he puts votives in a bowl and then has people come up and make a wish for the child and then pour the water into the bowl so that, so that all the votives are floating.

Bruce Feiler: [00:36:53] Um, by, uh, by the end. So I would like something then to take the thing that people have shared, and then maybe turn it into an offering. Right. So what we did at Ted was we then took. We then had these candles and we put them in bowls. We poured water in. And everybody then offered a wish. So you’ve shared with me that you, um, you’ve just finished this creative project. I then would come to the group and say, okay, my wish for you, Jonathan, is that, uh, you have the courage to share it with the world, that you get positive feedback, right? That you take criticism gently, that you go, so we need something now for everybody to then offer support to people around. So tell me something like that. That’s intrinsic. You could do the candle thing or maybe there’s another food involved. Maybe there’s a song, maybe there’s a holding hands, maybe there. So tell me something we can do to, to be with everybody in what they’ve just shared.

Jonathan Fields: [00:37:52] And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors. I want to clarify here because is this something that generally, um, let’s say there’s eight people that’s sitting around my living room where they would make an offering or, um, something a wish towards me. Or is this more collective? Like we like, we do it to each other.

Bruce Feiler: [00:38:14] I like the, I tell you, I’ll tell you what happened when I did this at Ted. I did two in a row. The first when people started coming up one by one, and I asked them to make a wish for the other person that they had spoken to.

Jonathan Fields: [00:38:26] Okay.

Bruce Feiler: [00:38:27] And then this interesting thing happened halfway through, which is people started coming up together and holding hands as if in a wedding vow, completely spontaneous. This is a reminder that a lot of these rituals and as you said, I went to rituals in dozens of countries around the world group baptism and the Vatican and adolescent filing, tooth filing in Bali, six weddings in a day in Las Vegas, ten funerals in a week in Ireland, sounding cold, plunging in Copenhagen, forest bathing in Chile, a placenta ritual in Easter. This is what I was doing. And then. So there. What there is, is a a way for everybody to feel involved. I talked to this. I just love this story. The woman who popularized Jumping the Broom, which was an old custom for people outside of church or the law, was originally white working class people in England and then went to enslaved Africans in the American South. And it died out after emancipation. And it’s become repopularized first because of roots and because this woman named Danita Roundtree Green, who wrote a book about it. And and she said, I knew it was going to be adopted by black families, but that’s not what happened. At first it was gay families, interfaith families, intergenerational families.

Bruce Feiler: [00:39:35] And she told me the story of that. The couple, she’s now done hundreds of these. The couple is sitting there going, you know, we’re going to jump the broom at the wedding. Okay. Are we going to jump on one? Are we going to jump on three? Are we going to jump on jump? And the audience is shouting out like it becomes a way for everybody to get invested in that moment. So when I see this as it’s that’s why I call it empathy, right? It’s a way for everybody to hold space to join in it. Right? There’s a thing that one designer I know used that I’ve been adopting. What I’ve been doing. Like, this is not a scripted show for your entertainment. This is audience participation. So you want to wait for everybody. So if everyone’s spoken, you can say, everybody pick somebody else in the circle and offer your wish for them, which it will just quickly become general because it will relate to all. So that’s what okay, so okay, so let’s so what do you want people to do? What do you want to do? Candle. You want to come to the middle and put. You got eight people sitting around.

Jonathan Fields: [00:40:33] Tell me what you want to do. Um, because it feels better for me for this to be some sort of like shared, um, intention across different people. So I’m going to have, um, a little piece of paper for each person and a pencil. I’m not a pen pencil, not sure why, but that just feels brighter to me. And I want them to write. Um, one An intention for another person in the room without naming them. Just write an intention that they feel like they would love to wish for anybody in the room, and basically put it into a small bowl in the center. And then we would each like, shake it around and each draw one out.

Bruce Feiler: [00:41:15] I will just tell you, I’m getting a little emotional hearing this. I want to just tell you a quick story. I was in South Africa attending this traditional bride price negotiation had been 17 years, and that was the day it was going to finally finish. Kids were raised, parents had died, and they were going to have a traditional wedding and what they called a white wedding back to back. And at dawn, the family woke up, took some from a marula tree, took some seeds or fruit and seeds, and they turned it into a beer. And they poured it as an offering at the base of the tree. Six months later, I was in the Andes Mountains in Chile talking to a Mapuche healer from the largest indigenous tribe in um in Chile and one of the most revered in South America because they had withstood invader after invader. And before I met this Mapuche healer to talk to him about ritual, he took a home brew and he poured it at the base of a tree. As I sit here today, I have no idea how that happens. There’s no internet when this starts, right? This idea, how is it that the same things. It’s like beyond Jungian like the same. There’s there is this original human algorithm. And I’m saying this story because what I’m about to what I was going to propose for the last thing was a moment of hope.

Bruce Feiler: [00:42:46] Okay, we’re turning fear into hope. And what I’ve been doing, inspired by a woman who had a miscarriage and felt shame and wrote out the feelings of shame. Throwing. Throwing it into the water. I was going to suggest at the end is that you have people take up. Because this is what I did at Ted and some others I’ve done recently that you take a pebble and you write out a hope for yourself, for the future, and then you take that pebble, walk to the middle of the room and turn it upside down. And as you know, the last funeral of the ten funerals I went to was of a man who died by suicide in Dublin. And I went to this memorial service in the crematorium. And as the body was being as the curtain was being closed, the woman, incredible woman, her Instagram name is bald, bald priestess. She said conflict. We’re here to honor the life of Carl and to deal with our own confusion about how Carl chose to end his life. And I have here a bowl of pebbles and I invite you to come and take one. Keep it as a memory of. It was where? From where he died. Keep it as a memory of Carl, or return it to nature. And so when I ask people to do is exactly what you just described.

Bruce Feiler: [00:43:57] And that’s why I told that story about the marula beer. Then everybody goes to the center of the room, takes the stone with someone else’s hope, reads it out loud. And then we have created this web of hope. So I love this. So then you could have people. Now what I did was I flipped it rather than the negative thing. So so I like what you, I think you said you’re your hope, your intention. If we use my words, the hope for the future for someone else, and then everybody goes, takes someone else’s, reads it out loud. And by the way, you can do it on the paper. You can do it on something more permanent, like a pebble. You could do it on that thing you made at the beginning, and then everybody can take that home, right? You can do it on a, on a, on a, you know, a origami crane like they have in Hiroshima. Um, but then everybody walks away with this web of hope connected not just to everybody there, but to this larger sense that we’ve created something special. What is this, Jonathan? It’s a shared, unnecessary act that makes you feel at home. That’s what we’ve created in this circle. And you know what? It took us, whatever, six minutes to plan. And I think marginal collective cost maybe $2.50.

Jonathan Fields: [00:45:16] Yeah. I love this. I love the simplicity of it also. There’s a, you know, like, you literally like these are five things and just go through and figure out what do you want each one of these things to be? And I would imagine also, you can kind of like map these out in your head and plan for it. And then in the moment, there are going to be times where it unfolds exactly the way you thought and hoped. And then there will be times where it kind of like goes off the rails a little bit, and there’ll be other times where something just profound and transcendent that you never saw coming happens. And you’re like, this is what was meant to happen. Even though I had no idea that that’s what, you know, what I really needed in my heart.

Bruce Feiler: [00:45:51] I talked to this woman who was a death doula, and she told me that the first meeting that she had with a family, she got there. The person had just died and she was grey murkiness in the air. And she had put her hands on the body, wash the body. She invited the widow to take the ring off. And she said, death is there’s an island of the living and an island of the dead, and we’re going to push. Our job is to push the body in a canoe, to go from the body of the living to the body of the dead, and we’re going to call out, oh, Uncle Bob’s there, you know the dog. And to make this connection. And then everybody looks around and realizes that we’re what’s left of the family. And then she has the the same oil they use to anoint the body. They anoint everybody in the circle. And what she said was every step of the burial, every step of the wedding, every step of the novel, every step of the illness is an opportunity for connection and a little ritual.

Bruce Feiler: [00:46:53] It’s right. It’s back to this idea. We’re going to move from rites of passage to rights of passage. We’re going to. We all need to have a ritual state of mind, because the reality is there’s the enemy’s in our pockets every day. And it’s the algorithms that we’ve outsourced our lives to are algorithms of division. The original human algorithm is an algorithm of connections. The way I look at this is, you know, we have a choice, okay, it’s virtual or ritual, it’s URL or IRL. And every day people are standing up and saying, I want new ways to connect. And so my invitation is, if you come on this journey with me, you’re going to see some things. You cannot believe. You’re going to go to these rituals, you’re going to go to these gatherings, you’re going to meet these people, and you’re going to be empowered to say, I can take that existential homesickness that I feel, and I can turn it into actual human, face to face Human gatherings, get togethers, rituals, ceremonies, and we can turn that homesickness into home wellness.

Jonathan Fields: [00:47:53] Yeah. Love that. So let’s say somebody’s joining us for the conversation. They’re not along saying, yeah, this feels this feels interesting. It feels right. Um, and they’re moving through a transition empty nest. Parents who may be transitioning, friendship that needs to be repaired or ending a career chapter, which a lot of people are moving through right now, and they want to design a ritual for the next week. Like they’re just, they want something to happen quickly, um, with what they have in their own home, in their own kitchen. What’s the very first thing that they should think about doing? Not necessarily the whole framework, which you just laid out so beautifully, but like it’s the first step in here.

Bruce Feiler: [00:48:32] The single most important thing you can do. And if you can do only one thing, that thing is do whatever it takes to make you feel at home. And what does that mean? That’s safe, that’s protected, that’s together. Okay. That’s a sense that you can join with other people and you can get through this. Okay. The three most powerful words in the English language are you’re not alone. You’d be hard pressed to tell me something after collecting 500 life stories that I have not heard about. Okay. Things that are joyful, things that are trauma, traumatic. Things that are divisive. Okay. You are not alone. And the only way to get through it is to get through it with other people. So the question that you need to identify is what would make you feel safest at this time? That is the purpose of this gathering, to find the tension, focus, the intention, and whatever it is that will give you confidence. That’s the purpose of what you’re doing, and you do not have to ask anyone’s permission. I hereby give you permission and to do it yourself on your own terms.

Jonathan Fields: [00:49:55] Beautiful. Feels a good place for us to come full circle. I have asked you this before. I’m going to ask you again. Because some years have passed and this container of Good Life Project. If I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up?

Bruce Feiler: [00:50:07] I think of something that my father said. He was a wise man, and he and I used to say about my father. He figured out what I think of as the key to life, which is the balance between short term sacrifice for long term gain and enjoying yourself along the way. That’s the first thing I think is the definition of a good life. But the second thing, in the light of how I’ve spent the last three years of my life, is the balance between being an individual and being part of a group I encountered this phrase, which I really appreciate, which is that we all have a we I. Axis where we balance between the we and the I. And if I was going to define one problem that is under-discussed in the world today, it’s that are we I axes are off kilter. They’re they’re off balance. Like I looked it up the hashtag self-care on Instagram 21 million uses the hashtag group care 18 like like we don’t even have a word for how to tend the groups. So I understand and appreciate and respect and value that. Caring for yourself, putting yourself first has value on occasion. But we have let our groups atrophy and therefore we all feel existentially homesick and alone. So what? What’s the definition of a good life is two axes. On one is the balance between short term sacrifice and long term gain, and the second is being an individual and being a part of not one, but many multiple healthy groups. Mhm.

Jonathan Fields: [00:51:59] Thank you. So let’s talk about some of the big ahas and actionable takeaways from this conversation. The thing that I’m really sitting with from this conversation is how much of what we call loneliness, especially in the middle years of life, is actually a ritual deficit. It’s not that we do not have people, it’s that we we don’t have the ceremonies that tell our people, this matters. I’m in a transition. I need you to witness it with me and maybe be a part of it with me. A few things I want to carry forward with this. Bruce’s definition of a ritual is maybe the most portable one that I’ve encountered, a shared, unnecessary act that makes you feel at home. You do not need permission. You do not need a guide or a script or a hundred people. You just need a threshold, a purpose, and at least one other person. The five ritual elements he walked us through welcoming, setting stakes, showing empathy, creating meaning, and closing with hope. You can build something real with those five moves in an evening, sometimes even in a few minutes. As we just saw with people you already know using things already available to you. And one final thing. The most powerful words in the English language, according to Bruce, are not necessarily I love you. They’re you’re not alone. Whatever transition you’re moving through right now, find the people who can say that to you in person and build something small enough to actually do specific enough to mean something together.

Jonathan Fields: [00:53:27] And hey, before you go next week, I’m sitting down with Stanford professor Tina Seelig to talk about something most of us have completely backwards. How luck actually works, the science behind it and why most of what we call luck is the result of deliberate actions hiding in plain sight. So if you’ve ever wondered why some people just seem to catch every break while others keep missing them, this is going to change the way you see that. Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss that or any upcoming episodes. And do me a favor, a Seven-second favor. Share this episode with one other person who needs to hear what they’re feeling right now, has a name and a remedy, and maybe a ritual that really is calling to be created. This episode of Good Life Project. was produced by executive producers Lindsey Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help By Troy Young Kris Carter crafted our theme music. And if you have not already, follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation. Until next time, I’m Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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