The Importance of Ritual when Changing Lanes

Every day when the work is behind you, and the shop and the store put the lock on the door. Just get away where your worries won’t find you. If you like, well I’ll tell you more.

Petula Clark

My Neighborhood Bar

We all have a special place where we go to feel good. It’s that favorite place we go to escape the daily grind, meet a friend, or mark a special occasion. In this place we can be ourselves and take a break in both space and time. If we’re lucky, its location is close by and easily accessible so it can serve as a place of ritual that speaks to our soul in a very personal and immediate way—just when we most need to make that connection.

For some, it must be a place of natural beauty and calm like a special tree in the park or a path along the water not too far from home. Others might prefer a friendly café with cushy chairs, comfort food, and a great sound track. It could be a place you go to be alone with yourself, or a welcoming spot for people to gather and talk about nothing and everything.

TV and film abound with images of such ritualistic places. Visualize, if you will, the jogging track around the reservoir in Sex and the City where Charlotte made her daily pilgrimage. Or the leather-boothed diner in Seinfeld where our favorite misanthropes complained about all of life’s miniscule annoyances. Think the coffee bar in Friends. These are places where we regain our bearings when we feel out of kilter with the world’s ever shifting scenery.

For me that place is my neighborhood bar, aka the Bel Air Hotel. For thirty years, I’ve been blessed to live in a lovely canyon a half a mile past this secluded gem of a place. Since moving to L.A. in the early 70s, I have made a ritual of going to this spot at every inflection point of my life.

You Want to Go Where Everybody Knows Your Name

My love for the Bel Air Hotel started long before I bought a two-bedroom house in the neighborhood. Like many Angelenos, I chose the beautiful dining room as the preferred venue to celebrate special birthdays, anniversaries and Mother’s Day with my plucky mother-in-law, Martha.

But my love deepened into a true relationship after my son, David, was born. As a working- and frequently traveling-mom, I cherished my weekend walks down to the Hotel with David in his stroller, visiting the swans in the pond and crashing weddings from a great viewing spot on the terrace. A year later when I was promoted to be the first woman partner at KPMG’s L.A. office, I accepted every invitation from friends to celebrate the big milestone on that same terrace. My friends and I drank a bottle of Champaign every evening for a full month of revelries.

As a single mother for eight years, I would meet my dates at the Bel Air Bar so we could check each other out in a very romantic, yet safe environment—and I could escape quickly in case the evening turned out to be a bore. When I finally met my bashert, we would often grab a quick burger with truffle fries in the bar while listening to the piano man play as though we were the only ones in the room.

Of course, our wedding was held at the Bel Air which, in February, may be at its most beautiful—all decked out with blooming magnolias and azaleas.

The Place for Changing Lanes

When I retired in 2003, I suffered a sense of dislocation shared by many Boomers experiencing this challenging midlife passage. While I didn’t miss the work, I had to admit that I missed the little workday routines that gave my life a comforting anchor in time and place. When these support mechanisms fell away, I looked for substitutes—ones that would have the side benefit of adding meaning rather than routine to my day. The hotel became the site of several of these new rituals.

As I’ve written before, one of my very first acts as a free woman was to get the dog I’d been denying myself during my 25 years as a management consultant road-warrior. Sasha accompanies me every morning to the valet parking entrance of the hotel, where the staff always gives him a pup-a-roni treat to start his day off right. Sasha clearly appreciates all the lovin’ he gets from all the guys (Kevin, Rodney, Tony, Mark, Bruce, and all the others). Sasha’s mom appreciates the great sense of community I feel when we greet one another every day.

Walking Sasha to the Hotel is a daily ritual that is part of my continuing effort to achieve a quiet mind, the first step in the process of Changing Lanes we wrote about in our book.  This state of mind is a requirement if you are to make good decisions about taking a new path to achieve renewal. It certainly helped me open myself up to the creative process of writing. During many of these walks, I listened to ‘60s folk/rock music on my iPod and came up with the lyric quotes that illustrate the themes of the book. To this day, I can still hear Cat Stevens in my head as I walk up-canyon to my house (“Oh very young, what will you leave us this time…”)

While I hoped to achieve a quiet mind, I also craved the constant stimulation of learning something new. Here again, the hotel played an important role. My personal bucket list of retirement ideas included taking cooking classes, since I felt so woefully inadequate in the kitchen. I signed up for a mini culinary school offered by Executive Chef, Douglas Dodd,  which included eating our beautifully prepared lunch at Table One, the Chef’s private in-kitchen table which normally takes months of advance booking to experience. 

This is indeed my special place. If I could figure out how to do it, I’d be very happy to be buried there (along with Sasha, of course).

Why is ritual important when changing lanes? 

Many people at this stage of life report that they suffer from a sense of loss—a feeling of being unmoored from one’s identity. While no one seems to miss the jangle of the alarm clock jolting them out of bed and into their commuting routine, they do miss that security of having a routine. Daily rituals are comforting, and when they’re interrupted, we can become anxious and unproductive. I found it enormously helpful to develop new rituals that fulfilled a whole range of needs I had as a midlife “explorer.”

What is your special place for the rituals that give your life a sense of comfort and meaning?

Share your story about your ritual place. We and our readers would love to hear from you.

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