Evening Ritual

Since I was a child, many of many priceless memories are around food. At home, my parents, I and my sister - we always ate our dinner together. It was and is, will always be our favourite bonding activity. Further, every weekend we would go to a restaurant and bond over food while we talked on interesting, insightful as well as entertaining subjects. Or we would talk about the movie we would watch for the first show in the theaters.

In every conversation, we have always had a valuable takeaway lesson from my loving and progressive dad. My father loves interactions, they range from topics on Politics, society and planet, to education and career options et all. He also often shares such lovely and humorous anecdotes from his childhood that talk about him doing education and farming- more like formal and real education happening parallelly. So, as long as he is around you are never bored and you will surely learn a thing or two before signing off. 

Recently my father mentioned about his evening ritual that he has been following for a long time now. Every evening, he explained that he plays a movie in his mind -recalling the events, his actions and responses, expression of emotions, words he has spoken and all forms of living during the entire day. He says, it has helped me become more productive, regulate his emotions very well as well become a much better person. 

As soon as he completed sharing his thoughts, I asked him everything in detail and decided to try the ritual myself. 

It has been a few days - honestly it has not been easy. There are moments I don't want to go back to and revisit let alone analyze and understand them, and then there some moments in the day- I just dwell in them without noticing the time. Basically, there is no focus and absolutely no smooth transition from one key moment to another.

Slowly I am learning to play the day's movie in my mind like my dad does- of course it takes effort and lot of patience. I am ready to try. I know it's more than worth.

What is your evening ritual? I am genuinely curious.