On small talk, sacred candles, and navigating dark times.
There’s something negative in the air.
I feel it in myself, and I notice it in others. I’m not the only one. A recent New York Times op-ed claimed we’re living “in the most pessimistic, darkest cultural atmosphere in American history, at least stretching back to 1850.”
There are real reasons to feel bleak. They’re so obvious and plentiful and I’m so confident that you have your own list that I won’t pile on by naming any here.
But moving toward a better future requires the ability to step in its direction. Doing that feels difficult when negativity is reinforced by our individual and collective attentional biases toward what’s wrong. It’s easy to get stuck in the muck.
We’re living in a time where we need opposing collective forces. Ones that work like lightning rods, gathering the negative particles of our attention and channeling them toward something sturdier, a stake in the ground.
Rituals can be that grounding force. They’re structured, repeated actions that carry symbolic meaning, per Merriam-Webster. They can be secular or sacred and serve myriad purposes. But one thing they have in common is that rituals “offer ways for emotion to be contained and channeled,” says University of Virginia religious studies professor and Rabbi Vanessa Ochs, PhD.
For a lot of my life, I haven’t embraced rituals. I see myself as someone who thinks for herself. Who isn’t afraid to do things her own way.
All that’s true. But I’m also someone who needs support. I accept that I can’t do it alone. And that surrender has made me feel newly appreciative of the secular and sacred rituals that are helping me cut through the miasma of negativity.
Take small talk: A secular ritual people love to hate. When you’re limited to inoffensive, low-stakes topics, you can’t be real, goes the critique.
There’s truth there. Small talk is not a ritual where anything goes. When you’re at the grocery checkout, you can’t answer “How are you?” with “Awful” without making things awkward.
I’d argue that’s ok. While never talking about the messiest parts of your life is a recipe for poor emotional health, so is going too far in the opposite direction.
When it’s always time to rehash what’s wrong, you’re ruminating, a symptom and driver of multiple mental health diagnoses, per the American Psychological Association.
And, look, I’ve had enough training in psychology to know rumination isn’t healthy. But, even for me, it’s hard to unhook. In a world where negativity garners engagement and wins elections, I believe it’s helpful to preserve contexts where you’re expected to buck that trend and practice curating the positive.
I went on a small talk blitz this week, thanks to near-daily community events – a possibly unprecedented cadence since I started working from home.
The first time someone asked me what was new, I flubbed it.
I don’t remember exactly what I said – it might have been something about two of my kids having influenza A – I just remember how it felt: Bad. I had emphasized the worst part of my week.
I had been honest. But it wasn’t a truth worth focusing on. I felt depleted and overwhelmed when I thought about their health and whether the rest of us were about to be in for a bad time.
At the next event’s small talk, I let the ritual’s gentle constraints nudge me toward a different truth. What came out of my mouth was upbeat and just as honest. I think it was about how seeing fifth graders spontaneously help each other on a field trip I chaperoned made me feel hopeful for the future.
Choosing what to emphasize doesn’t mean being dishonest. No experience – or life – is just one thing.
After a week’s worth of small talk, I honestly felt better. My loved ones can attest that I still had (and shared) plenty of negative thoughts, but respecting the ritual of small talk by keeping things light created a subtle shift that extended beyond the moment.
Sacred rituals, often honed over hundreds or thousands of years, can do the same.
For instance, I, along with other Jews around the world, just celebrated Hanukkah by ritually lighting the menorah for eight nights during some of the northern hemisphere’s darkest days.
It’s a religious ritual with layers of symbolic meaning. One that feels particularly resonant right now was famously articulated by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson: A little bit of light dispels a lot of darkness.
If hearing the words gets the point across, why bother enacting the ritual? Just like with small talk, there’s something different that happens when you embody rituals rather than simply extract a lesson from them.
For eight nights, I curled my fingers around a lighter and lit the shamash, my lips forming the sounds of ancient blessings.
Menorah lighting isn’t a tradition I grew up with, though my kids have. Maybe because of that, on the first night, a part of me always wonders what the point is. Menorah candles are small, barely bigger than birthday candles. How could lighting one matter at all? But when I do, I see: My kids can play dreidel by that light. And by the final night, with all nine candles ablaze, it’s undeniable: Small, consistent actions really do add up.
I understand, in a way that I’ve only been able to learn from experience, how adding light to the world is a choice. It requires agency and preparation. You have to gather your candles and kindle a spark. When we placed our electric menorah in our window, to ritually “publicize the miracle,” I understood that letting the world see your light takes intention.
You can muster this agency, preparation, and intention completely on your own. But it’s hard, and you don’t have to. Other humans have encountered the same difficulties and constructed secular and sacred rituals to address them.
Submitting to their structure might mean overriding what’s instinctive — like reporting what’s wrong or letting the darkness take over — but their constraint also provides something sturdy to stand on as you make your way to a place that’s harder to get to by yourself.
Rituals offer collective answers to collective needs. If we’re arguably in “the darkest cultural atmosphere in American history,” that’s not a me problem or a you problem. But it is our problem. And rituals can be our lifeline for light.
My Latest Writing
I love when you read a research paper and you can just tell the scientists are actually deeply thinking about what people need. For instance, I recently read about a study addressing a painful fear many parents with bipolar carry: If bipolar disorder runs in families, what can I do to protect my kids? In the study, researchers created a short, preventative therapy to help kids at risk for bipolar disorder. I get so excited when I find studies like this, and I’m so privileged to get to share that excitement with readers of bpHope. You can read about this study and four others — each with practical, hopeful takeaways — in my latest article:
Bipolar Research & Insights: Diet, Family Therapy, COVID-19, and More | December 2025.
Book Recommendation
The Lighthouse Road: A Novel, by Peter Geye
The books of Peter Geye, lifelong Minneapolitan, have been prominently displayed on the shelves of local bookstores for almost as long as I’ve been combing through them. That means I’ve spent almost two decades unfairly judging his books by their covers. To me, the covers and book jackets foretold “Dude Novels,” a term I just made up to convey the sense I got of Geye’s books being about and for men. I figured they’re be nothing to grab me, so I left them on the shelf.
But a bookseller at Apostle Island Booksellers finally grabbed me by the metaphorical shoulders last year and told me to get over myself, that Geye’s novels are just Good Novels. She was right.
The Lighthouse Road, the first in a trilogy, follows a young Norwegian woman who arrives at a logging camp outside Duluth in the 1890s and her son in the 1920s, who undertakes his own journey to begin again. That’s the outline of the plot, but the story is really about family, what we carry from our ancestors, and how we respond to the choices we make and those that are made for us. In contrast to my biases, the female characters are complex, not caricatures. In a similar vein, the logging camp setting didn’t lose me; the sense of place is actually one of the book’s strongest points. It’s a quiet, yet riveting novel perfect for reading on snowy nights.
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