Ritual
The Morning Ritual
A short defence of the deliberate beginning
Mercer Studio4 min read
ritualmorningdaily life
“Speed is fine for the middle of the day. The morning belongs to something slower.”
In the 1970s, a Japanese ceramicist named Shoji Hamada was asked by a British interviewer how he started each day. His answer was specific: he made tea, from a particular bowl, with water that had been boiled in a particular kettle. He said the texture of the bowl in his hands before he had fully woken up was the way he found out what kind of day it would be.
This is not mysticism. It is an understanding that the morning has a special character — a permeability that the rest of the day closes off — and that the objects you handle first thing shape the register in which the day begins.
The First Twenty Minutes
Most mornings are governed by speed. The phone is reached for before the eyes have adjusted. The kettle is boiled while multitasking something else. The first objects handled are also the ones requiring least attention: the tap, the mug that is grabbed because it is nearest, the cereal that pours itself.
There is nothing wrong with this, exactly. But it does establish a certain tempo, and that tempo tends to persist.
The deliberate morning is not slower in the sense of taking more time — most of what we are describing fits within the same twenty minutes. It is slower in the sense of requiring presence. The bowl that is selected rather than grabbed. The oil that is applied with attention rather than speed. The first cup of something that is made properly rather than approximately.
The Objects That Make This Possible
The morning ritual depends on objects that reward attention. Not objects that are complicated to use — complication is not what we mean by deliberate — but objects that are pleasant to the touch in the specific early-morning way, when the hands are not yet fully awake.
A ceramic mug with a slightly textured exterior. A wooden-handled brush. A glass bottle that catches the early light.
These objects do not make the morning more productive, if productivity is measured in tasks completed. They make it more inhabited — more specifically experienced rather than passed through.
This is the case for the well-made object in the morning: not that it is superior in function (though it often is), but that it requires you to be slightly more present. And presence in the first twenty minutes is a kind of resource that compounds.
On Not Making It Complicated
There is a version of the deliberate morning that has become its own form of anxiety: the six-step routine, the twelve skincare products arranged in order, the coffee ritual that takes forty minutes and requires seven pieces of equipment.
This is not what we are describing.
The morning we have in mind has, perhaps, three or four objects that matter. The ceramic cup. The oil or cream that gets used every day. The small ritual of making something rather than opening something. The deliberate beginning is defined less by what is added than by what is given proper attention.
Hamada’s morning tea was made in one bowl. The bowl mattered. The water mattered. Everything else was already ready.
The objects in this issue — the amber bottle, the clay cup, the linen towel — are chosen because they are good at being handled in the morning. They are honest about what they are, which is to say they do not pretend to be more or less than they are. They do their jobs and they do them with a quality of presence that makes the twenty minutes before the day begins feel like something worth having.
That is the whole brief. It turns out it is not a small one.