The One You Feed - How Rituals Help Us Find Meaning in Times of Change | Bruce Feiler

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

In this episode, Bruce Feiler explores why rituals have been essential to human life for thousands of years—and why they're more important than ever in today's rapidly changing world. Drawing from his new book A Time to Gather, Bruce explains how meaningful rituals can help us navigate grief, celebrate milestones, strengthen relationships, and create a greater sense of connection during life's biggest transitions. Along the way, he and Eric share personal stories of loss, family, and the healing power of gathering with intention. Feeling overwhelmed in your life?Check out Overwhelm is Optional — a 4-week email course that helps you feel calmer and more grounded without needing to do less. In under 10 minutes a day, you’ll learn simple mindset shifts (called “Still Points”) you can use right inside the life you already have. Sign up here for only $29! Key Takeaways: Why humans instinctively create rituals during times of change How personalized rituals are replacing traditional ceremonies Bruce's five essential life rituals for today's nonlinear lives How rituals help us process grief and strengthen relationships The surprising role of the "group keeper" as a peacemaker A simple framework for creating meaningful rituals of your own For full show notes, ⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠!⁠ If you enjoyed this conversation with Bruce Feiler, check out these other episodes: How to Harness the Power of Rituals with Michael Norton Science and the Sacred with Sasha Sagan This episode is sponsored by: ⁠⁠⁠⁠David Protein⁠⁠⁠⁠ bars deliver up to 28g of protein for just 150 calories—without sacrificing taste! For a limited time, our listeners can receive this special deal: buy 4 cartons and get the 5th free when you go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠www.davidprotein.com/FEED⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠Talkiatry⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ connects you with licensed psychiatrists for personalized, evidence-based mental health care, all online and covered by most major insurance plans. To get matched with an in-network psychiatrist in just a few minutes, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Talkiatry.com/FEED.⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠Pebl⁠⁠ – an AI-powered platform that helps companies hire and manage global teams in 185+ countries. Get a free estimate at ⁠⁠hipebl.ai⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Alma⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ has a directory of 20,000 therapists with different specialities, life experiences, and identities, and 99% of them take insurance. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠helloalma.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to learn more! ⁠⁠⁠⁠Quince:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Refresh your wardrobe with Quince by going to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Quince.com/feed⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too. ⁠⁠⁠Shopify⁠⁠⁠ – The commerce platform that helps you build, grow, and manage your business all in one place. Start your $1/month trial at ⁠⁠⁠shopify.com/feed.⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Tiny Health⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠'s at-home gut health test provides science-backed insights into your microbiome, along with personalized recommendations to help you improve your digestion, energy, and overall well-being. Get $50 off your first test kit at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ tinyhealth.com/FEED⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The top-down, prescripted, institutionally mandated, hierarchical, in many cases, patriarchal ritual, that's what people don't want anymore. They don't want the mindless, meaning-free birth, right? The funeral that's just reading from the script that has no personalization of the life of the person. That's what people don't want anymore. But what's happening is that people still crave the ritual, which is why basically they're going off script. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the importance of the ritual.

the thoughts we have. Quotes like Garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true, and yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

When my mom died recently, the hospice did something I wasn't expecting. When the funeral home came for her, the staff wheeled her down the hallway, and everybody on duty stood along the walls ringing a small bell. I stood there too, watching my mother recede down that hallway. and for those few minutes, nobody in that hallway was grieving alone. Bruce Filer would say that's the whole point of a ritual. His new book is A Time to Gather, and this conversation goes from grief to Ohio State football, sometimes in the same breath.

I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Hi, Bruce, welcome back. Thank you so much for inviting me. Eric, I've been looking forward to this conversation. I don't know how many times you've been on. now. I don't really closely track it, but this is at least three, I think. So possibly more. You've got a new book, which is why we're talking. It's called A Time to Gather, How Ritual Created the World and How It Can Save Us. And we will get into that in just a moment, but we'll start in the way that we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with a grandchild. They say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And love. And the other's a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. They think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say,

well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I didn't remember the third part of that question. And I knew the parable was coming. And I purposely didn't think about the parable in advance, because as you said, you've been kind enough to invite me on the show, at least twice, because I wanted to answer it in the moment that I heard it, not in the lying awake in bed and thinking about it. And what was interesting hearing the parable, again, is that as we have this conversation, I have young adult children. I've been thinking a lot about the difference between having younger children or even adolescent children and now young adult children. I'm the

fathers, you know, of identical twin daughters. They're 21 now. And I think maybe the first couple of times I heard this, I would have thought a bit as myself. And now I think about it as my talking to them. We're also taping this conversation. Father's Day is approaching. And so what I hear in the parable now is one wolf representing be true to yourself.

And the other wolf representing be true to the people. around you. And I think that we are in this very challenging moment in that the voices of the people around us are stronger than ever. And our ability to hear them is easier because our phones bring them to our ears and to our souls at all time. And I think learning to feed the still quiet voice of yourself, and maybe that's even the still quiet voice of God, is more important than ever. So to me, the balance is to tune one out and tune the other in. And that's to me what feeding means at this moment in life, because to me, it's feeding the soul, but even more than that, it's feeding your ability to get in tune with what life is really about. And that's so much harder

when there's all this noise about what life is not really about. There is a lot of noise. There is no doubt about that at all. Okay, so I want to walk into the book here and tell me why a book about rituals. So I'll use the frame that we just were talking about. 21 years ago, as we have this conversation, my wife and I went from empty nest to full nest in 32 minutes when we became the parents of identical twin daughters. 32 minutes.

32 minutes. As complicated and stressful 32 minutes as I've ever lived because Linda delivered one of our girls naturally and then the doctor said the heartbeat's dropping we're going to have to cut the second one out and the nurses around Linda's head said, no, no, I believe she can deliver them.

And she delivered the second daughter 32 minutes later. I later learned it was an old obstetric trick to threaten to threaten the C-section to get an exhausted mother to push the second one out. You've got to be kidding me. I'm not kidding.

I'll link on the story for a second because the doctor, this was April 15, 2005, and the doctor at the end of the 32 minutes looks at his watch and says, oh, April 15th, tax day, early filer and late filer. The single funniest joke I've ever heard

and the single, like the example of someone like in his own, like this is what he did. He was a humorless person for the entire time we were with him. He delivers this unbelievable joke in the circumstance. And then the next moment he comes to check on, you know, to check on everybody. And I was like, doctor, that was a great line. I've gotten a lot of mileage out of it.

And he's like, you're the writer, kid. And he went to being impersonal. And he was never funny or personable again. Like he was put on this earth for those 32 minutes. And we got through it. Anyway, 18 years later, we went from fullness to empty nest in 32 minutes. when we dropped our children off at opposite end to the same college campus. And I drove back into Brooklyn, where I'm talking to you from now today.

And I walked through my front door. And I had a very precise feeling, which is that I felt homesick in my own home. And I thought, you can't use that word. That's what kids feel on the first day of kindergarten or like the first night of sleepaway camp. But it wasn't just my kids. My dad had just died. You know, you and I've been carrying on a conversation through email in recent months as we both went through loss. is, in my case, my sister-in-law, in your case, your beloved mother who was so proud of you

in this great book that you just published. So my dad had just died, my mom was aging, my marriage, which was built around those kids, like, needs to be renegotiated, all my friendships need to be remade. And it really wasn't just me. I think, you know, we were in this moment, as I don't have to tell you, but like, we carry the enemy around in our pocket. And there's this feeling that so many of us have that we've sort of abdicated our relationships for our smartphones. And we're all craving this connection. I was like, there must be ways to connect. And I went looking for solutions.

I stumbled into what I think of as maybe the greatest story I've encountered in my life, certainly in 40 years of writing books professionally. And the essence of it, and I know we're going to piece it out, but the essence of it is that ritual works. We have 300,000 years of evidence. That's before we were anatomical humans, that the first thing we ever did is to gather and bury our loved ones together. We know rituals from 500 academic studies.

We know that rituals calm us when we're stressed and synchronize our heartbeats and make our families and our neighborhoods and our communities and our teams stronger. And yet, for the first time, in the first century and the 300,000 of them, we're turning our backs on traditional rituals, right? Birth and coming of age rituals are in rapid decline. Only half of us are married. Only a third of us get buried anymore, which is shocking to me because cremation is rising so rapidly in this country. You know, it took us all these years to build up norms and we are abandoning these norms. And yet, and now this gets into sort of some of the subtext of what we're talking about, there's been a human response to this, which is people are creating astonishing new ways to gather

all around the world, what I call a renaissance of ritual, kind of really the pushback against loneliness and big tech overreach and all this kind of stuff. And I was like, that's a great story because the old rules don't apply, the new rules haven't been written. And so I spent three years going to rituals in 16 countries on six continents. and the time to gather is both kind of a great adventure story, like how I spent the empty nest, but also kind of a toolkit for how to make gatherings that everybody will love. So I want to ask a question about ritual and when it's useful and kind of when it's not.

I'll give as an example. On my dad's side of the family, there'd be a funeral. We would go. But we didn't live really close to the rest of the relatives. There was no real sense in that ritual beyond that moment. really connecting us. So it wasn't like the ritual bonded the family together. And, you know, sometimes I have a suspicion of like the one-time event versus the ongoing maintenance of things. So talk to me about what makes it so? The event, the ritual, actually is something that brings people

together and that that carries forth. Well, that's such a subtle and thoughtful question. I'll give you the short answer and then maybe kind of then take a step back and work my way back to the topic. I think the short answer is the quality of the ritual. Right. Okay. Yeah. A lot of what's happening is in the world today, and I can talk about a little bit how we got here, is that the top down prescripted, institutionally mandated, hierarchical, in many cases, patriarchal ritual,

that's what people don't want anymore. They don't want the mindless, meaning free birth, right? The funeral that's just reading from the script that has no. personalization of the life of the person. Like that's what people don't want anymore. But what's happening is that people still crave the ritual, which is why basically they're going off script and they're creating their own. I mean, so that that's the short answer.

The longer answer is that we think today that ritual, kind of the default is that it was created, religion created ritual. And so we sort of take our kind of complicated relationship with religion and impose it onto ritual. It's the opposite. It's the other way around. We have evidence of ritual, as I said, 300,000 years. Like anatomical humans are only 150,000 years old, right? And we didn't have civilization or organized religion until much, much, much later. So we have hundreds of thousands of years where we're burying our dead, right? Or, you know, celebrating unions or having occasions to mark any kind of instability. And if anything, it's the narrativeizing of that. It's the

turning it into replicable ritual, that's what creates the religion, and that's what religion's good at. So organized religion, broadly speaking, I don't have to tell you this, but I will just say that loud. More or less comes in the second half of the second millennium when you have Judaism and Christianity and Buddhism and Chintoism and Confucianism. All will come about in a period of a few hundred years. And those institutions turn out to be very good at institutionalizing ritual, right? Five of the sacraments, you know, the Jewish calendar. go on and on and on and on. So that makes them replicable, portable, and they can spread around the world. So you go back 200 years ago when for the first time organized religion, let's just say

takes a step back from being the center of life. What happens then? The academic study of ritual. Oh, wait, this is something that may be different. It can have a life outside of religion, right? Then you have Durkheim comes up with collective effervescence. He's the great social scientist at the Sorbonne, Arnold Van Gennan, a German anthropologist. He invents rights. of passage and a book in 1909 that creates the term. And he says, it's very simple. You have four in order in your life, birth, coming of age, marriage, death. The problem and the reason there's so much kind of turmoil now is that that that kind of

normative linear life, it might have been the first one, but certainly you and I had a conversation about my book life is in the transitions, right? And the essence of that is that the linear life is dead and it's been replaced by nonlinear your lives that have many more twists and turns than just kind of four or five once every birthday that ends in zero or whatever. And those are the lives we're living now and people want new rituals. So if you look at the new rituals, they're often for things that no one ever honored before, right?

Gender reveals, NICU graduations, cancerversaries, sober verseries, death doulas, end of company doulas, pet funerals or a $3 billion business now, right? Daddy-daughter dances, mom prompts. These are all ways to mark transitions, and in many cases that institutions never honored, right? So not just marriage, but divorce, not just birth, but still birth, not just fertility, but infertility. My wife's favorite chapter, which I've been saying so much I'm now beginning to worry about, is the Taylor Swift divorce party, right, about a woman who invents a divorce party that goes viral. And so the difference is that these don't have the prescripted boring rituals that you just said you don't like.

And as a result, what's going on is that the old rituals are being modernized so that we do not because they need to compete. And the new rituals are trying to find kind of traditional elements to give them the resonance that once we've done for thousands of years might still carry. I ordered a great linen shirt from Quince recently. I loved it, but now my partner, Ginny, has absconded with it because she seems to love it even more, which tells you two things right away. First, the shirt is great. And secondly, I no longer own it. But I get why. Quince makes really high-quality essentials that feel good the second you put them on. I discovered linen shirts in Europe a few years ago, and theirs are as good as anything I get over there, and you can wear them almost anywhere.

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That's H-E-L-L-O-A-L-M-A-M-A-D-E-M-A-D. com slash feed. When my mom passed recently, we realized we didn't really know what we were going to do. Bingo. We knew she wanted to be cremated. So we had that. This was very recently that you said to me that the family gathered. You told me that on the stage.

And so you're discussing this. And is she religious and the kids are not? Or everybody's the same degree of religiosity? Are there some kids that want religion and something? How much conflict is there? Because the purpose of the ritual in part is to, modulate the conflict. So those are good questions. My mother was mildly religious, but not really. Got it. She also, over her life, alienated most of the people that she was close to, unfortunately.

So she was living in Denver now and she hadn't made any real friends there. Her friends in Columbus were kind of, there was maybe like one or two. So there's a funeral doesn't quite make sense. We're having a cremated. But what I realized was we hadn't planned any of that. We hadn't really thought about any of it. And you probably had not made collective decisions as a family for a long time. Not like that. No. I mean, I guess my mother gave us the benefit of, you know, God rest her soul, running into trouble often enough that the three children.

And then we discovered there's a fourth child who's been entered into the family later. We often had to come together and be like, well, how do we bail mom out of this one? Or how do we share her expenses? So she's in the hospital again. What I know about her son Eric is he's also had a lot of experiences with bailing himself out of difficult circumstances. So you probably have a voice with a lot of authority in those conversations. Yeah, yeah. She had a difficult life in many, many ways.

So we ultimately are still right now. Like we don't quite know what we're going to do. Now, I probably shouldn't state this on air. I'm going to distribute some of her ashes at a place that was near and dear to her heart that probably doesn't encourage that. So that's coming. There's a little covert activity. I'm not going to, again, I'm not going to indict myself. From having right a time to gather in the Walt Disney World, they have a group called Team

Grandma when someone decides to the ashes in, it's a small world, and it freaks out the kids. They have to stop and bring and put hazmat suits in. So they actually have some experience with this in the event that it's a Disney property. This is going to be just like a couple sprinkles. I'm not going to dump like a big giant thing of ashes. So we were then like, well, what could we do? And this is still all in progress. We're going to do this.

Everybody knows. I'm taking over this podcast now. You and I are going to help design that ritual in the second half of our conversation in real time. All right. Okay. Well, I can tell you what we've thought about. And then we'll get to that. Okay.

So real quick, ritual, incredibly valuable. It's been part of what we as a species have used forever. Religion sort of ritualized some of those rituals. Yes, well said. and that the big four birth, puberty, marriage, death are important, but you, in the book, proposed five recurring nonlinear life rituals. Do you want to share those with us? Yeah, I think that it's just very, very clear that that framework that was put up a hundred

a century ago just is irrelevant to the lives that we have today and wanted to capture them. So, A, I think that there are five that recur each on a. kind of bespoke fingerprint of whatever particular life course. You and I've had linear lives that have parallels, but are very different, right? When we have the transitions, my data, as you remember, when we talked about life as in the transitions, is we spent half of our adult lives in a lifequake and in the tradition that helps us navigate through. So we need these whenever we need them.

So lose their parent, you know, older in life. Some people lose a parent before they're born, right? Like these happen must our lives. And so I wanted names. The reason I like lifequake and life transition is that there's no values attached to them. Like almost half of lifequakes are involuntary, like a diagnosis or a death or a tornado or a pandemic. But almost half of them, 43% are initary. You know, an involuntary lifequake is your spouse cheats on you.

A voluntary life quake is you cheat on your spouse. Like we quit jobs. We take turns. We change our belief systems. We move. So wanted life quake and life transition because they're very value neutral. And I wanted that for these. So I think that there are five recurring life rituals.

Coming. So welcoming. Like that would be traditionally like a tism. But it also could be a engagement party. Welcome becoming like the adolescence. That also might be quitting a job to do something else. That might be walking away from a safe job to go and art an entrepreneur thing or begin a creative project. So welcoming, becoming loving, right?

Whatever kind of relationship that might be. It might be a wedding. It might be a commitment ceremony. it might be a thruple ceremony, you know, whatever it might be. Which obviously can be mourning of a loved one I've done recently, but it also could be, you know, mourning the loss of a leg, right? As someone who almost lost a leg to cancer or also of a job, a view status, the loss of a pet.

And then renewing, right, which to me captures the idea that our lives go through these periodic events of consideration and intervention. And one of the reasons I wanted to use those words is that they're neutral, but there's another reason, and that is that kind of every ritual has every other ritual in it. This in a lot of ways from my kids when we had a little gathering long before I was doing this book, when we took them off to college. It turned out that they were mourning the end of their childhood as much as they were anxious about the becoming of young adulthood. That's what I feel like we experienced also. mourning the end of the sort of, you know, day-to-day parenting, as much as I was wondering what was going to happen as I said about parenting young adults. And as anyone with young adults will know, it's not the same, but it also is not a clean break anymore.

And so every ritual has every other ritual, right? Even having a baby, if it's the first baby, might be mourning the end of, you know, just being a couple or just being a single or having your life. So we have these five rituals. They occur whenever they occur. and also everyone has almost every other one inside it. So in addition to these five non-linear life rituals, welcoming, becoming, loving, mourning, and renewing, you also talk about four kinds of rituals. Civic, calendric.

Is that how you say that word? I mean, I say calendric. I never checked it when I did the audio. Yeah. A political ritual, a civic ritual is like an inauguration or a coronation. A calendric ritual is like Thanksgiving or Summer Soul's. or, you know, Valentine's Day. And have day-to-day rituals, right?

So, handshaking, namaste, grace over a meal. You have really what a lot of this is about, which are these life rituals, like the mark occasions in our lives. And I'll be worth pausing. Though later I'll tell you why I don't care about this definition, as you know, from having time to gather, but it's worth it just to sort of put a definition on the table

that we can, you know, grapple with. So I define a ritual as a show. shared unnecessary act that makes us feel at home. Okay, it's an act because it's a doing. It's not a talking, right? You know, tell a story and you can listen to a story. You can listen to a story and that's verbal and that's oral or, you know, that might be. This is embodied storytelling.

We are telling a story together. Like, okay, you can have one version of the loss of your mother. A sibling could have an entirely different version depending on their relationship or in this case, a lost sibling might have an entirely different relationship, but this is something we're going to tell together. And as we move later to planning, helping you plan this ritual, you'll see that part of the rule of the ritual is to accommodate all the individual stories and make sure that everybody feels right. So it's a doing, it's an act. Next, it's shared, right? You know, you could take a walk in the woods with your dog, and that's a great experience.

But forest bathing, which is one of the fastest growing rituals on the planet, which began in Japan, and is now, takes place in 160 countries around the world. I went forest bathing in the Andes Mountains of Chile, done in a group, particularly with the idea of connecting not just to nature, but to those around us, right? And then you've got this unnecessary thing,

which sounds the weirdest, maybe in some ways the most important. It's unnecessary. You don't have to get down on one knee to get engaged. You do not have to wear black to mourn. You do not have to circle the bride seven times to get married. These are unnecessary things. things that become necessary because we give them collective meaning.

Okay? So a good example is hand washing is utilitarian. It serves a purpose. It's necessary to clean your hands so you don't get sick, right? Handshaking has no utilitarian purpose. It's basically to say, I don't have a weapon and let's build a relationship, right? The dinner bell is utilitarian. Come to dinner, wherever you were out in the fields upstairs doing your homework.

The chemo bell, which by the way, I had chemo 18 years ago, there was no chemo bell. It's an entirely new ritual of, let's gather at the end of this. Share what a chemo bell is. A chemo bell is when someone finishes chemotherapy. There's a bell on the floor. They ring the bell, but they don't do it alone. The nurses come. Maybe the other patients.

The family comes. When I ended chemo, when I got the last test that said, I don't have to come. I cried by myself on the sofa. The chemo belt is a way of making that a collective event. So I don't feel alone. I feel the sadness of, oh, my God, what I just did to my. body, the hope of what I hope it will do to my body, which is ravish it, but kill the cancer, and the collective event for all the people.

It's a perfect example of a modern ritual. So shared unnecessary act, and the most important that makes us feel at home. And what do I mean by that? Safe, secure. It's scary. I just lost a loved one. I die of cancer. Okay.

It's coming in. We're getting married. What is that going to mean? I'm moving from one place to another. I'm changing a job. I lost my bed. you know, I've just given an organ donation. I'm having divorced. Whatever it is, in the moment of most instability, it gives you the preciousness of stability. You tell in the book, and I don't

remember the person's name who invented a ritual like the chemo bell, this happened at the hospice I was at. They have a thing where when the funeral home arrives to pick up your loved one, they wheel them down and everybody who's on duty stands there. Oh my God. They ring a bell. They encourage you to stand there. And it was this beautiful moment. They said they were going to do it.

And I was like, all right, fine, whatever you want to do. But it was really, it was really special. Tell us what you're describing is what I'm describing, which is the worst here and you think, a little woo-woo, I don't really care. It's not so important. And then what do you actually feel? Yeah, I mean, I wasn't that dismissive. But what I felt was, I don't know, I guess I felt that we were marking this thing in a very special way, that we were together.

It felt like an opportunity to honor my mom, but also honor the nurses who had taken care of her. It was very emotional. The main thing I felt was a lot of emotion. Some of that grief, you know, watching my mother recede down a hallway on a stretcher, right? but also it was uplifting in the way that often causes tears. I have that a lot, right? Where it's like, I can't say like I'm crying because I'm sad. I'm crying because there's a strong emotion present.

I can't even always put my fingers on what it is. But it was that experience. First of all, that's a beautiful description. And let's just all pause and like hear that for a second for and thank you for sharing that. I know it's still relatively recent and raw as we have this conversation. I will tell you how I process what you just said as now having been thinking about this for four years. First of all, I want to say

that we sacrileize what is scary. I mean, think of the fairy tales, right? Into the woods, right? Where do the ogres live? The ogres live in the woods. The ogres live under the bridge. The ogres live outside, like in places that are liminal. That's what's scary.

And we are sacralizing it. Like the wolf, the ogre, the dragon. Like, these are scary things. Why are scary movies surging in popularity as we have this conversation? Because we have a lot of intended and unmarked fear in us because of the pace of change that we're all living our lives. So that's the first thing I want to say. The second thing I want to say is, going on here is that we have outsourced so much of our

lives to big tech and to algorithms that are designed to divide us and breed hate among us. Ritual is the original human algorithm. and the craving that we have and that we are expressing. I am saying we should do this, but even before I say that we're should, I'm saying that we are doing this, that it is happening because we feel the craving. And the craving is, what the heck do I do with these emotions that I just lost my mother? Like, a few minutes ago, we were looking at, you know, blips on a screen and wondering do we need to give her water and what's going to happen or maybe five days ago or five weeks ago or five months.

months ago, our family was scattered everywhere. Now we're brought together in a way that we haven't been together in a long time, where if there's a, you know, a child you didn't know before, have never been together. Like, that's complicated and things to do. And now suddenly we have this emotion, and it was so described so beautifully by a death dula who told me the story about when she gets to the room, to the room and three in the morning when the body, when the person dies, it's like there's this gray, murky mess. We spend a lot of our times in a gray murky mess right now in our lives.

That's just a fact. And we have nothing to do with it. And what the ritual is, vessel to convert the gray, murky mess into a slightly less gray, slightly less murky, potentially thing of beauty. So that someone shows up and says, let's put a ritual here. It is a vessel. It creates structure. Okay. It creates a sense that this is a, that we have non-ordinary feelings and we're going to create a non-ordinary space in which to accommodate it.

right, when we get to designing a ritual or any ritual, right? The first thing you need is a sacred space. And it's, this is why circuses have rings, right? Or, you know, those have courts or fields and trials have courtrooms. They are spaces that hold these complicated things. They say outside, I was that, and inside that I'm this. And what they're saying is, you are going through a non-ordinary experience. And the way this woman Sarah Kerr is her name.

The way she said to me is so good. She said trauma is when things are happening faster than your mind. can process them. So your body is experiencing this and your body and your mind. And as a result, your relationship with the other bodies and other minds around you are out of sync with one another. And so by ringing a bell, by paying tribute, by having an honor walk, that's the story that I tell in my book about this one of Missy Holiday and we can get into it.

But now I've sidetracked with all this theory. But it's creating a vessel for you to have a collective experienced. It's embodied storytelling. Its values lived out loud. And that's what it does. It forces you to do it. And once you stop, what happens? All the emotions come pouring out.

But they're there. There were other people to catch. Yeah. I mean, and I remember, you know, we knew my mom was within days or hours for days, a few days, not too many. And I can't find it right at the moment. But I was like, all right, I need to write something that I say after she passes. because I don't think anybody else, I just don't think anybody else in my family's going to do that.

Public ceremony, but just to one another in that moment. Right after she passes at her bedside when we're all there, you know, it took a little while. I was the one who was there overnight that she passed. So, of course, she passed. I called everybody. There's a really interesting odd story in there also. But I called everybody, once everybody got there,

then I, you know, I'm a certified interface spiritual director. I should be able to pull this off. So I... I'm lots of twist and turns in my life that I found meaning through. So I can help everybody. I'm the know. This is my life. Like I'm the know it all.

But turns out. Yeah. So I, yeah, but it was the same thing. Like you said, there was this gray murkiness that I knew was there. Again, since we hadn't talked about any of this or planned any of this, none of us really knew what to do. One of the things I remember from my dad's death back in 2021, um, during COVID but not from COVID, I remember actually looking at the social science of this

and writing about this in my newsletter that's now in substack, the nonlinear life. Sarah Kerr in that same story, what she said is after they say goodbye to the body, when she leads them through a ritual where they wash the body, she invites the spouse to take off the wedding ring. Her narrative is that,

is that where there's a land of the living and there's a land of the dead, and that you call out people and that the job of the family is to push the body, like on a canoe, to go from the land of the living to the land of the dead. It's a beautiful way of framing it. And she has people call out, oh, Uncle Bob is over there, right?

Or maybe the family pet is over there. Like, call out the Aunt Judy or maybe the lost child or whatever to beckon the land of the dead to receive the new member of the community. But that's not where it ends for her. She then says, look around. This is the family now. And we need to reassign that, you know, that spirit. Okay? And that's what interesting enough, what the social science says, what the social science says that happens in that moment is that the role that the patriarch, right? Or the clown in the family or the baker in the family or the storyteller. My son Eric, the storyteller, those roles get reassigned. And that's the, that's part of the essence, right? There is the morning of the saying goodbye, but there's now the becoming of a new rule that those of us play. Okay.

So the relationships among the survivors, the relationships among the people who were no longer, like the parents left behind in the empty nest or the siblings who've gone off to, you know, into young adulthood or to join the army or whatever it might be. There's, and that's what's going on here, right? So if it's true that you and I met with life as in the transitions, that book of mine was how each of us individually handles the transitions and the lifequakes and the twists and turns of our lives. What we're talking about here is how the group handles them, right? It's not a life quake. It's a group quake. It is a group reimagining it to welcome someone new, to get a little larger, to get a little smaller and reassign the roles.

It is tending the group, right? I'm very much, and I think that what really got me excited about this project was that I'm a groupkeeper. I just am. I'm the one who runs the family dinner game, who runs the backyard Olympics, who runs the, you know, who leads the family meet, call it the family meeting, leads the family meeting, collects the family stories. I'm not really a joiner outside of my life. Like, I don't belong to 4H, you know, or to the rotary or to YPR. That would have been a surprise to me.

Have you just pulled the 4H card out of nowhere? I'm really a joiner in my family. Like, you know, and I'm in it. And we all have to tend the group. We all have groups. Maybe it's not your family. Maybe it's your office. Maybe it's your team. Maybe it's your co-religionist, the people you protest politics with whatever it might be, that your AA group. Like, I don't really. care, but we need groups. Our biggest source of happiness and meaning is our relationships, and we need to focus more time to cultivate our relationships, and the internet is not helping. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of

ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. Eight years ago, I was completely overwhelmed. My life was full with good things, a challenging career, two teenage boys, a growing podcast, and a mother who needed care.

But I had a persistent feeling of I can't keep doing this. But I valued everything I was doing and I wasn't willing to let any of them go. And the advice to do less only made me more overwhelmed. That's when I stumbled into something I now call this still point method. A way of using small moments throughout my day to change not how much I had to do, but how I felt while I was doing it. And so I wanted to build something I wish I'd had eight years ago so you don't have to stumble towards an answer.

That something is now here and it's called Overwhelm is Unile. optional. Tools for when you can't do less. It's an email course that fits into moments you already have taking less than 10 minutes total a day. It isn't about doing less. It's about relating differently to what you do. I think it's the most useful tool we've ever built. The launch price is $29. If life is too full but you still need relief from overwhelm, check out overwhelm is optional. Go to one you feed.net slash overwhelm. That's one you feed. Dot net slash overwhelm. So I don't know quite where in the book this is, but I remember you talking about this idea of being like a group keeper and like what are we actually, if we are that role. You said that what we

are is mediators. Yeah. Talk about that. It was a surprising thing. Like we're talking about the five things that rituals are and soon we'll talk about the five things rituals do to help people play in their own rituals. But there's a couple things that they, four things actually that they do. They connect us. We've discussed that, right? They chronicle our lives. If you ask anybody listening to us, like, give me the 10 pivotal moments in your life. Most of them involve rituals, probably. Weddings, births, deaths, new jobs, achieving something, whether they're in work or in sports or whatever it might be. They create special places. But the surprising thing they do is that they correct imbalances within the group. We're often afraid of the ritual because of the conflict. But the

conflict resolution is a main part of the ritual. It titrates and modulates the conflict. Let's go back to my dad's funeral. So my dad, just to remind you of the story or people who don't know it, just to tell the story, my dad grew up in Savannah, Georgia. He was like a civic builder of the kind of 20th century. Strangers stopped him in airports and said, you look like an interesting person. He stopped strangers in his hometown and said, are you lost?

Can I direct? Like, everybody loved my father. He was never depressed a minute in his life until he got Parkinson's, got depressed. tried to take his own life six times in 12 weeks. And he lost the plot of his story. And like we tried everything. The only thing that kept him alive is when I sat down one morning, one Monday morning and sent him a question,

tell me about the toys you played with as a child. And he, who was not the writer in the family like Eric, wrote that story. And I sent him another the next week because I was so excited. Like, tell me about the house you grew up in. This continued for eight years until weeks before he died. He finished a 65,000 word memoir, one question, one answer at a time. Like, it's an astonishing story.

We finally published the book last year, got the whole community together that could not during COVID. Anyway, so he dies. Eight years later, we all go back to Savannah, Georgia, my hometown. And I'm in a conversation, my job, my role, actually. It's not the storytelling. In this case, it was interfacing with the rabbi to plan the funeral. I'm the planner here. The group keeper, done the group ritual.

my mother says, I don't like throwing dirt on a coffin. I find it barbaric. I want it nowhere near its funeral. I think we should have long stem yellow roses. At which point, my little sister says, the throwing of the dirt on the coffin is the only part of the ritual that I like. There is no ritual without it, and we must have it.

Okay? And I think long stem yellow roses is too hallmark. Okay? And I'm like, no one was backing down. I was like, uh, rabbi, I'll call you back. at which point I then proceed to middle child my way through a solution, which I later learned from the designers is how you do it. Like, okay, mom, what are you really after?

And okay, Carrie, you know, my sister, what are you really after? And I was like, by the way, she lived with a guy for 60 years, including taking care of him in very, like, she wants to let her have the roses, right? So what did we do? We ordered three dozen long stem yellow roses. And then we also went to his beloved Tybee Island at the beach, and we got little packets of Tybee Island sand, and we gave everyone a choice.

Like the ritual created the conflict and the ritual resolved the conflict. And if I could just jump ahead, and yeah, people are groupkeepers? Are we huggers? Are we talkers? You know, are we planners? No, you know what we are?

We're peacemakers. We want the group to hold together and there we will make the peace, even if it doesn't make everybody absolutely happy. And just to tell one quick addendum to this, the ninth of the 10 funerals that I attended in my week of attending 10 funerals in Ireland was in Dublin of an older woman and she loved Broadway musicals. So even in the church, they played some songs and everybody sang like she was a very modest

woman. I can tell you, behalf of her grandchildren were dressed in prada. And then we're going to go to the cemetery and the undertaker, the mortician, is a woman who's the head of the funeral director's society. She says to me, how are you getting to the cemetery? She's like, how did you get here? And I said, I took an Uber, like the most modern answer of all time. And she says, well, how are you getting to the cemetery?

I'm like, I have no idea. And she says, ride with us. Before I could think I said, yes, at which point she opened the back door of the hearse, puts up the jumper seat. I sit down and there I'm riding to the funeral, excuse me, with the dearly departed soul of the woman being buried. So we get there. by the way, I didn't know the difference between a coffin and a casket. Coffin has the, is a hexagon. It's got the angles where the shoulders, whereas a casket is rectangle.

So she's in a coffin because they have to, she, they're going to put her in the same grave with her, which is what they do in Ireland with her loved ones, with the family. So you need the body to deteriorate, which is why they don't have steel coffins. Anyway, they lower and the priest is there. He does the traditional service actually dust to dust and ashes to ashes and all of that, right? from Earth we came into Earth we're going to return. They lower the body and then someone steps forward and each member, about three dozen members of the family, that's the only one to come,

each gets the long stem yellow rose and tosses it into the grave. And I'm sitting there. We've all been to weddings where you think the wedding is every wedding I've ever been to. And like this suddenly was every funeral I'd ever been to, including my own fathers. And I'm sitting there weeping all over again.

Because again, that's the emotion that you talked about when the body leaves the hospice, right? Which is, I didn't know I was carrying around this emotion. I'm like a reporter. I'm taking notes, you know? I'm thinking about it analytically. But yet there is the emotion living there. And as soon as they do that unnecessary,

that shared unnecessary act that makes us feel at home of throwing that long stem yellow rose, I'm back at my father's grave, feeling the same things all over again. I'm fascinated by the logistics of how did you make this happen. So how many funerals again? So I went to group baptists. into Vatican, adolescent tooth filing in Bali, traditional bride price from negotiation in South

Africa, six weddings in a day in Las Vegas, and 10 funnels in a week in Ireland. Okay, so those last two are the ones, particularly the last one. Even the weddings, you know what day it is you can kind of figure out, but funerals don't happen on a schedule. Did you just show up in Ireland and start asking people? Do you have a funeral I can go to? Like, so funerals, I mean, to call them the national pastime is slightly disrespectful. Funerals are a big, deal in Ireland. Like, like, you were supposed to show up at the wake. And as a result, funerals used to be passed around when everybody lived in the same area, right? Then it went to the newspaper. Then it went to the radio where four times a day, still to this day, in Ireland,

every radio channel, have nine noon, six and nine. They on the radio recite, it's not a law. It's what people want and expect. They tell you who died so you can know who to show up, okay? then, and I tell the story of the book, as you know, somebody put this online with rip.i.e. Dot i.e is the extension for Ireland. And now it's online. So people go, you know, and their traffic is like 9 o'clock in the morning, which is like right when people are getting to work, they are checking. So therefore, oddly, it's actually not that hard to find out who is being buried. I have no idea to do it in Brooklyn while I live or even Savannah where I grew up.

But it's actually not that hard. And in this case, I knew I was going to Waterford, which is the oldest city, and I knew I was going to Dublin. And I actually wrote and became connected to the head of the Funerals Director Association. And through a combination of RIP.I.E and people willing to help, I got invited to all of these funerals. And these are the ones that I happened to go. Now, that's the sort of short answer. It turned out to be the country in the world where it's easy enough to find the funerals. Now, within that, it turns out that the funerals are very different.

and that's another story that actually I think is very moving. Tell it. Well, I think that, so if you look at the difference between the first and the tenth, and Waterford, okay, that's the oldest town in Ireland. And this is the oldest business in the oldest town, our Thompson funeral directors. And they invite me over. Actually, I had never seen a dead body before, right? And there were three.

I mean, within 15 minutes of walking there, they're getting their makeup done, their hair done. And this was someone who died in his 90s. and he was religious, but the children were not. We were talking about that earlier, right? And the children say, you know what? We should honor dad with a traditional funeral. But Catholic funerals are so in rapid decline because of the church-cess abuse scandal, because of the scandal of people taking babies from Edwood Wethers

and putting them into what are called Magdalene Laundries and 50,000 women where there's a whole bunch of reasons. There's no priest in the cathedral in Waterford, Ireland. So they got to get to rent a priest from the next town who's going to do this funeral. And they have the wake in the funeral director's home, funeral home, not the home. And the guy has a kid in his 60s who is in the one percenters. He's a Harley writer. And the one percenters is the one percent of motorcycle riders who don't mind being called hooligans. Right. It literally says, we don't give an F on their website and the F is spelled out.

So they come with their motorcycles. So we got two motorcycles. Then you got the funeral director in a top hat looking like Fred Astaire in his 80s. They put the body in the hearse and then four Harley's behind and then all the family and we all walk to the church where the rent-a-priest runs this, what would have been an impersonal funeral except funerals are changing because they have to. The church has to respond. Okay. So they allow them to have personal objects. In this case, they got a soccer ball. They got a red and white scarf because he's a big fan of the Liverpool Reds.

And as they lead the body out, and the guy tells the story of coming, by the way, great time to have this conversation. The World Cup, as we taped this, we're having the World Cup. He went to the World Cup in Ireland, never left the country, finds one fish and chip store to eat at for 10 days. They play the theme song of the Liverpool Reds, which is Rogers and Hammerstein's, you'll never walk alone. So they play it, the Jerry and the Peacemakers version of it. People are singing. People are crying. people are booing because some people don't like this football team.

An amazing spectacle. Fast forward a week later to the 10th and final funeral I go to, which is at the biggest cemetery in Ireland, but the body's being cremated, a man in his 40s who is a theater performer, and he dies by suicide. Conflict. The woman running this is not a renta priest or any priest. She is a secular officiant, big eyes,

rainbow-colored eye shadow, no hair from alopecia. She goes by the moniker Bold Priestess and she stands up

and she doesn't sugarcoat at all. Eric, he was so powerful. We are here to honor Carl's life but also our own

confusion about how Carl chose to end this life. So at the end, they're going to close the curtain and she says,

I have a bowl of pebbles. Please come take a pebble. This is from the river where he lived and where he died. Keep it as a memory

of Carl or give it back. And as we, as everyone does this, and as we exit this chapel, we're going to play Carl's favorite song. On comes Frank Sinatra, singing you'll never walk alone. And it's wild. Same thing I said earlier about, first of all, do the reporting, by the way, just as a writing matter. But there's something universal about these things. One was a church.

One was a, you know, secular. One was religious. One was not. One was Amanda died at 90 of a living full life. One was a man who cut his life short from mental health. Like, but yet the same ritual elements perform the same magic in both rituals. That's wild and beautiful. All right.

If we're going to honor the promise you made earlier, we need to get to designing my mother's ritual. My family's going to be like, what? You did what? You designed it on air? Well, we're going to try it. But can I first tell you what a couple of the thoughts are? Sure.

Give me all the beautiful stuff and all as much of the messy stuff as you're comfortable sharing. I mean, there's not a lot of messy stuff. She had said to some of us over the years she wanted to have her ashes spread in the Caribbean or then we all inferred maybe Florida because Florida was like her favorite place. So maybe there's maybe we go there and do that. But the best idea we've had is she was an Ohio State football fanatic. Oh, nice. Like it's just the kind that, you know, I look at and I'm like, settle down. It's a game, but not to my mother, right? Not to my mother.

Here's the conflict. My mother went to Michigan and we're going to have to deal with that in this conversation. Yeah, we are. I love all matters. My brother is a big fan and my new sister, her husband, is a big Ohio State fan. And so what we thought about was all of us, my brother, my sister, his kids, my son, everybody that was there meeting for an Ohio State football game together this fall. Awesome. Okay. So let's say that's what we're going to do. Basically what these are, to boil it down to its essence, is a beginning, a middle, and an end. Okay. What we need at first is we need a sacred space. We need to decide where we're going to do this, who's going to be there, and how do we make the space sacred?

What you're talking about with the honor walk, with the hospice and the honor walk that opens a time to gather with organ donors about to give donation and create it. It's an incredible story, which I won't slow us down by telling now. But that's trying to sacralize a very unsacred place, right? Which is a hospital corridor, right? Or in your case, a hospice hallway, which is like that. So we need to figure out where, okay? So let's just start with that.

So where are we going to do this? Okay, I like that we're doing it again. Are we going to do it at tailgate? Are we going to do it, you know, I'm guessing we can't do it on the 50-yard line unless we're doing it on? When you say when we do it, I guess it depends what we're doing. I mean, the doing for us is going to the sacred hall. of the horseshoe. Okay.

But where are we going to do this? We're going to do it in the stands? Are we going to do it in line to get, you know, before? So I understand that we're going to do the gathering, but let's just go back to a theme in this. So is this going to be after the game, during the game, before the game, the night before the game? Like, where are we going to?

So I feel like, remember, we talked about weddings. There can be the engagement, the whatever. So where are we going to do the actual ritual? of which the other stuff is going to be the dressing or different ritual parts of it. I guess we had not gotten that far. Okay. So ask this question. And the most important thing is to identify a place.

It doesn't really matter, right? It could be a place on campus if the weather is beautiful, if it's a fall afternoon. It could be in the hotel room the night before, right? It could be a park that, you know, maybe she lived in Columbus, Ohio, but we need a place. and what we need to do is then open the circle. You know, when my sister-in-law died, this was happening around the time your mother was dying and you and I were emailing about it.

You know, my brother came, we all went to say goodbye and she was in hospice for less than 24 hours and by the time we got there, we did not get to second one. And so we have this gray murkiness, right? Where we're bumping around, getting some food, hugging, crying, not knowing what to do. And the next day my brother comes and says, I want everyone to sit around and share stories about Laura

because we had at this point almost two dozen people there. And I was like, great, but not to be pedantic, but let's turn it into ritual. We need to open the circle and we need to close the circle. So he says, oh, yeah, we have this piece of art, this can't, this vase that we used to light every night before dinner. So we put that in the middle lighting it. We're here. So we need a time and a place to sort of say, we are here to honor, what's your mother's name? Jan.

We're here to. I was going to say Janet. Wow. I don't know if I, you know, intuited that. We're here to honor Jan, so we need this place. And what you want to do here is choose the people and then identify the tension. We're here to mourn. We're here to celebrate.

We're here to connect. Okay, it's different from when she just died. In this case, you know, six months has passed. And we're gathering here to honor the life to whatever it is, right? Think of a time to gather comes from Ecclesiastes. There's a time to mourn, a time to dance, a time to weep, a time to laugh, a time to scatterstones and a time to gather them. So we're here. So number one, we need a beginning.

Create a special place. Say this is why we're here and this is what we're going to do. Okay? That's the beginning. Now let's turn to the middle. You need compromise. This completely grows out of what we were talking about. Another death dula that I talked to in Australia, the leading ritual designer in Australia.

She tells me the story about this family. She's been working. She's like, I don't like conflict. I'm a ritual designer, but 80% of my cases have conflict. And she tells the story of a man who dies. He's got a second wife and the youngest son from the first wife who was previously estranged from the now deceased, completely estranged from the second wife. And it's in the will that a prayer has to be read. And the second wife says, he wasn't religious anymore.

We ain't doing that prayer over my dead body. The son says, I've come for the prayer. Like that was my mother. That was our life. and I don't want that. The second wife says, you know, I want to do a poem or whatever, whatever it is. And so she's like, my heartbeat is rising. I'm stressed.

What am I going to do? And she says, what are you really after? What are you really after? And she goes home and she writes something that she's going to say that includes the prayer and also includes the poem. So you've got different people here. You've got the storyteller and you. You might have the baker, right?

You might have the dancer. You might have a strange child that suddenly come back. So you need things in the middle, embodied things in the middle, almost like what I call something old, something new, something borrowed, something new, maybe something religious from your childhood, maybe something non-religious, maybe something. You need a peace plan where everybody feels that it's their ritual, even if it's a shared ritual. So tell me what might that be. By the way, everybody can add one of their own. Yeah. I mean, I don't think that there's a ton of conflict.

Like, my sister, Mary, who's the sister that we discovered a number of years ago, who has been welcome into the family and her and my mom had a beautiful, beautiful healing relationship. You know, I think her and her husband lean a little bit more religious. So they wanted the chaplain to come in and say a few words as my mom was in her last days. And none of us had an objection to that. Like, that's not my thing or my brother. others thing, but sure, let's do it. So I think there's, there's, there's an openness to finding what different people need. So I think I would have to sort of group source. Like, what would be

meaningful for you in this? Like what, what, that's all you need, Darren. Something is simple as as everybody contribute one thing. Give us a piece of music. And by the way, have that thing grow out of your relationship with her. Right? So maybe... You mean each person's relationship with her. Oh yeah. With me, we always baked oatmeal cookies.

So I'm going to pass out oatmeal cookies. With me, she always sang this song. Okay. You know, to me, I gardened and she and I, she loved tending roses and I tend roses. So we're going to hand out roses. So something that expresses your own, something old, something new.

something borrowed, something you is the one I'm adding. Like it's not blue and it's not six pence in your shoe. It's something that makes it both universal but also very specific. Okay. And we're going to do that in the hotel the night before, in the parking lot, the day of, literally the interview that I had right before you, someone was talking about, you know, is tailgating a ritual, right? It's a shared unnecessary act.

So maybe she was a tailgater or maybe she was a, Gardner, again, that's the middle. Now is the end. What do you need at the end? You want to end with a moment of hope. A thing about funerals that's a little surprising is that funerals are for the living, not for the dead. I like when people leave things behind they want, but ultimately, this is for the group

to reconstitute itself. I have this weird factoid in my head from my time when I was working on my book, The Secrets of Happy Families, and when I was writing a column in the New York Times about contemporary families. And the weird fact toy that came from the editor of Reunions Magazine was that most family reunions grow out of funerals because people get together under duress for a sad occasion. They realize we kind of like one another and we should do this more often and they do the reunion.

So you want to end with that. Okay. We've had the time to mourn and the time to dance. Now we want the time to hope. We want to look forward. Right. What I've been doing and the rituals that I've been leaving. I ran to a TED this spring in Vancouver when they were moving, you know, to Florida for the next years, Ted.

I did it at LinkedIn recently is I've been doing what I did what I saw in that funeral in Ireland as I've been taking pebbles and having and giving and bringing Sharpies and having people write a hope for the future and then turn that pebble upside down in the middle of the circle and then everyone take that. So you have your own hope you're trying to manifest and then someone else's hope. But you want psychologists have this term. I'm sure in the many episodes of the one you feed. You've done this where your best possible self. Like you cannot get better at your tennis game or your souffle will not get souffle here or your garden will not get greener if you don't identify the goal. This is our best possible self, our best possible selves.

You want something at the end that reassures us that the group will survive without the matriarch and the group will continue. And that's what you want. So what is that? is that a pebble? Is that a song? Is that a food? Is that a walk to the park? I mean, to the game. What is the act of hope that now takes, we've honored the past, we've created a special place outside of time. We've honored the past and everybody in it. Now we want to project the future. How are we going to end this ritual for your mom? Storming the field and tearing down the goalposts. There we go. Okay. I kind of like that. Let's go in and let's get a chilly dog.

You know, that's what the weird thing that she liked to do. What does she wear? Why did she like the Ohio State Buckeyes? The Ohio State Buckeyes, he says. I think she just, she grew up here. Yeah. You know, she was here, her until the last two years of her life. So, you know, the Buckeyes were the big thing.

So what's the corneous thing about the Buckeyes? Is there a weird food? Is there a fight song? Buckeyes are delicious, though. This hang on Sloopy. That's a little bit of a strange fight song. Okay. Right.

So I got a fight song. I got someone dotting an eye, you know, look at me. You know, I want something that's a little goofy possibly, right? Yeah. And that represents, this is her. She was the dot on the eye, you know? Eat the buck eye. Drink the drink.

I've certainly contemplated how to bribe the member of the band who dots the eye to do something. So, you know, there's options there. I think this is, again, these are great ideas that are probably group source to see what other people. Like I think my brother and my mother have shared a lot more Ohio State football stuff than I have with her because it wasn't as much my thing. I mean, I knew she loved it. I texted her go bucks every week. It's a little bit challenging because we're entering the beginning of summer stuff and football season. So, you know, I'm just going to be in and game.

Grateful for your vulnerability and for the connection that we have been building. By the way, another way to do it is start a, you know, I won't say start an NIL fund. But, you know, like, make a donation. Have something that will carry this forward in the memory of your mom. That's another way that you could do it and you could announce that at the end of this occasion. Beautiful. Well, we are at the end of time. We are actually way over time.

So I am going to force us to end this. However, I would love to continue the conversation and the post-show conversation because I'd love to hear a couple more ritual stories. So tempt a listener. Like what's a great story that we're going to talk about here in a minute? Don't tell the story. Let's just let them know what they're going to be listening. Maybe I'll finally tell the Honor Walk story, which began, you know, in Central Ohio. And the other story that I tease, which I should tell, is the Taylor Swift Divorce Party.

All right. If that doesn't get you to come to the after show, I don't know what well. Yeah, exactly. Listeners, if you'd like access to those fascinating stories, all the other post-show conversations, add free episodes, and if you want to support something that, is valuable to you and mean something to you. Go to OneUfeed.net slash join. Bruce, as always, it's a real pleasure. The pleasure is all mine. I just love this conversation and I'm so... Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring,

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