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My nano project is the Kemetic 101 I've been saying I was gonna write for over a decade, which is differently brainstretchy than fiction and in many ways easier to keep nano pace for. (A lot of it is 'let me regurgitate things I have been studying for many years, here, blat, there they are.')
But anyway I wrote a thing and came away with "this is a genuinely new thought I haven't had before" and I'm going to put it here so that I keep it.
The Egyptians were very much nervous about extraordinary events. Even festival celebrations were routinized, with those things that differed from the regular daily ritual kept fairly minimal, and the core of the practice being "we do the regular daily ritual and then add these specific bits". Things that were out of the routine were places that the chaotic and dangerous might seep in.
So I'm writing about rituals for major life events and a thing strikes me (this is not the new thought; this is ritual 101): the thing about ritual is that it leaves one not-alone, there are the other participants, there is the idea that this ritual is something that has been done before, will be done again, it is brought into the ordinary and routinized, even while remaining a potentially-unique personal event. (And how unlike a lot of cultural expectations this is, that ritual sets things apart and sacralizes them by separating them from the routine.)
The new thought part is: any action taken as a unique, personalized individual is high-risk.
(And I ponder that one of the things that has made me better able to do lots of story submissions is that I have both routinized and de-personalized them in many ways; I have a stock cover letter, I have stock this, I have stock that, the events may be individual and unique but it is just part of the perpetual cycle of them. It is no longer something that feels high-risk to me as an individual.)
But anyway I wrote a thing and came away with "this is a genuinely new thought I haven't had before" and I'm going to put it here so that I keep it.
The Egyptians were very much nervous about extraordinary events. Even festival celebrations were routinized, with those things that differed from the regular daily ritual kept fairly minimal, and the core of the practice being "we do the regular daily ritual and then add these specific bits". Things that were out of the routine were places that the chaotic and dangerous might seep in.
So I'm writing about rituals for major life events and a thing strikes me (this is not the new thought; this is ritual 101): the thing about ritual is that it leaves one not-alone, there are the other participants, there is the idea that this ritual is something that has been done before, will be done again, it is brought into the ordinary and routinized, even while remaining a potentially-unique personal event. (And how unlike a lot of cultural expectations this is, that ritual sets things apart and sacralizes them by separating them from the routine.)
The new thought part is: any action taken as a unique, personalized individual is high-risk.
(And I ponder that one of the things that has made me better able to do lots of story submissions is that I have both routinized and de-personalized them in many ways; I have a stock cover letter, I have stock this, I have stock that, the events may be individual and unique but it is just part of the perpetual cycle of them. It is no longer something that feels high-risk to me as an individual.)
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ETA: Possibly because I just recited it to mark the first night of this year's Hanukkah. The Shehekhiyanu is always recited on (the first night of, if applicable) holidays, because every year's iteration of a holiday is its own unique event.
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I think that is entirely in the character of an insight.
You know "everything is narrative"? I think most of the stories are there to be about insecurity management, one way or another. Many constructions, but this constraining objective of less doubt and fear.
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This is also very like the ritual setting things apart and separating them from the routine, in a sense -- it is separating the things from the day-to-day routine in which they would be something chaotic and different, and puts them into a different (sacralized?) context in which they are routine. This feels like it is connected to the kinds of time -- this thing is unusual when it's embedded in day-to-day happening-time, but routine in being-time of ritual and cycles, and I have forgotten the relevant time-nouns.
I am presuming that the nervousness about extraordinary events is also a significant part of what led to technologies to predict things like eclipses, so that they fit into known cycles.