The Little Rituals That Quietly Save Us
Change. It sometimes arrives unannounced in the form of a new city, a new job, a goodbye you didn’t expect, or a dream finally coming true. And with it comes the excitement, the thrill, and often, a strange kind of emptiness.
I still remember the first time I found myself in London where everything was unfamiliar. The streets didn’t know my name, the sky looked different, and even the silence sounded foreign. I was supposed to be happy, it was all I had worked for. But beneath the surface of that excitement, I felt untethered. Adrift. Like a page that had lost its chapter.
And then something quiet brought me back to myself.
It was in the way I made my morning tea, boiling the water just right, watching the leaves dance before the first pour. It was in the songs I reached for on slow evenings those timeless melodies of Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi, or S. P. Balasubrahmanyam. Songs like “Yeh Shaam Mastani”, “Likhe Jo Khat Tujhe”, or “Tera mujhse hai pehle ka naata koi,” felt like home, like a warm light in the corner of a dark room.
No one else noticed, but these small, seemingly insignificant routine acts, like listening to old Bollywood tracks, praying before bed, doing some rounds of surya namaskar, taking the same walk at the same hour became the quiet rituals that held me together.
In a world obsessed with change, movement, and reinvention, we often overlook the silent heroes of our story ‘our routines.’ The ordinary ones. The ones that don’t make it to Instagram or bucket lists. But those are the ones that ground us, that remind us we’re still us even in the middle of everything shifting.
Think of the comfort we find in TV shows like Friends or How I Met Your Mother. The characters grow, move cities, fall in and out of love, face failures, find themselves, but what remains constant? In Friends, it’s always Monica’s apartment, Central Perk, the Thanksgiving dinners, Joey’s love for food, and Chandler’s sarcastic jokes.
In How I Met Your Mother, it’s MacLaren’s Pub, Ted’s storytelling, and the gang meeting on that same old couch every time life gets too loud.
No matter how much changes, these rituals, places, inside jokes, birthday traditions, or even how they say “I’m fine” when they’re clearly not become anchors. Not just for the characters, but for us too.
It’s the same in our own lives.
Whether it’s applying kajal the same way every morning, wearing that one lucky kurta/outfit on important days, or cooking your mother’s daal recipe on lonely nights, these things matter. They are not frivolous. They are sacred. They are how we whisper to ourselves, "I’m still here. I still know who I am."
So the next time life pulls the rug from beneath your feet, pay attention to the little things that remain. Hold on to them. Honour them.
You don’t need a grand morning routine with five apps and seven goals. You just need one habit that brings you back to yourself. One small ritual that says, “You’re safe. You’re home.”
Because in the grand symphony of life’s uncertainties, it’s these quiet, consistent rhythms that become our heartbeat.