Why Every Moment Worth Feeling Is Worth Ceremonising

There is a moment, usually quiet and unexpected, when life asks you to stop. A child is born. A relationship ends. A house becomes a home. Someone you love is no longer here. You turn another year older and something in you knows, this one is different. We feel these moments deeply. And yet, so often, we let them pass without marking them. We tell ourselves we don't need a fuss. That it's enough to feel it privately. That ceremonies are for other people, for bigger occasions, for those who have the time or the money or the community to gather.

But here is what I have come to believe: if it moved you, it deserves to be marked. Ceremony is not about performance or tradition for tradition's sake. It is not about following a script or ticking a box. It is about pausing long enough to say "this happened", and "it mattered". It is about inviting the people around you to witness that truth, and in doing so, to become part of it.

This is not a new idea. In his landmark work The Rites of Passage (1909), anthropologist Arnold van Gennep observed that across every known human culture, regardless of geography, language, or tradition, people have always marked life's great transitions with ceremony. Birth, marriage, death, and everything in between. He argued that these rituals are not simply personal events, but acts of community reorganisation, a way of gathering around an individual and collectively acknowledging that something has changed, that a threshold has been crossed, and that the person stepping through it is no longer walking alone.

Without this act of incorporation, he suggested, the individual risks remaining suspended between one life and the next, held in transition but never quite landing. We have always known this. We have always gathered.

Malidoma Patrice Somé wrote that ritual is called for because our soul communicates things to us that the body translates as need, or want, or absence. We enter into ritual in order to respond to the call of the soul. I return to these words often, because they speak to something most of us already know but rarely give ourselves permission to act on. That longing to mark a moment is not indulgent. It is human. When we gather, whether it is two people or two hundred, something shifts. The moment becomes shared. It is no longer just yours to carry. It is held by everyone in the room, woven into the memory of your community, offered to the people who love you and the life you are building.

You do not need a grand occasion. You do not need permission. You only need a moment that matters, and the willingness to honour it. That is enough. That has always been enough.