For Small Creatures Such as We by Sasha Sagan

I don't remember how For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World by Sasha Sagan came across my radar. Was it a blog? A podcast? A recommendation from someone in my real life? I don't know. I'm sorry, friends. If it was you, thank you!

Sagan is the daughter of the astronomer Carl Sagan and writer/producer Ann Druyan. In this memoir/history/philosophy/self-help book, Sagan looks at rituals through the lens of a secular person. Each chapter turns into a tribute about celebration and rite and the importance of community. I deeply connected with Sagan almost immediately because I was also raised in a secular home and one of the first things she wrote was the sentence: 

For me the biggest drawback to being secular is the lack of a shared culture. (page 7)

This has always been something that I've been searching for as an adult. A way to have shared community and shared experiences without having those very important, necessary human desires linked with mysticism or belief. 

Beneath the specifics of all our beliefs, sacred texts, origin stories, and dogmas, we humans have been celebrating the same two things since the dawn of time: astronomy and biology. (page 13)

I love that Sagan broke down rituals into these two simple things. We celebrate births and deaths. We celebrate equinoxes, fall harvests. We celebrate the innate biology that makes us human and the innate wonder of the universe. 

If you paired this book with Birth by Tina Cassidy, I think you'd fine some interesting overlaps. But whereas Cassidy writes about birth as a feat of biology, Sagan thinks about the remarkable luck and coincidence that has gone into making every human.

Being born at all is amazing. It’s easy to lose sight of this. (page 19)

Whatever your ancestry, the list of wars, raids, plagues, famines, and droughts your genetic material had to overcome is stunning. (page 25)

In this book, Sagan walks us through rituals, some formalized by religions or decades of cultures, but others created for a single family or community unit. It's organized by the themes of celebration of biology and then through seasonal celebrations. It makes me think that she and I would be friends and I want to get together with her and have dinner and talk about inventing traditions.

But in the end, I have a lot of questions. What is the difference between tradition, ritual, and habit? I feel like this matters to those of us who live in the secular. I asked my husband this question and Catholic background came to the forefront when he responded that ritual is sacred. What does it mean to be sacred to a secular person? 

When I get up in the morning, I stumble downstairs, throw on some shoes, and walk the dog. We spend the quiet minutes of the morning listening to the stillness, glancing at each other now and again, and enjoying time together before the reality of the day has really begun. Is this is a habit? It's something I do on auto-pilot with very little thought. Is it a ritual? The meditative nature of this walk cannot be overlooked. 

Every Valentine's Day, my husband and I sit at the dining room table with construction paper, scissors, markers, and colored pencils spread around us making one another cards. Is this a ritual? Is it a tradition? 

I don't think this is a case of me being a pedantic jerk. I think these definitional differences matter in a real way. A birthday party does not actually seem like a ritual to me - there's generally not much in the way of reflections - and I feel like reflection is an important part of ritual. But Sagan's has classified the birthday celebration as a ritual and I'm not sure I agree.

I do think, however, that whether a celebration or activity is a habit, tradition, or ritual, it is super important that we all have these moments of joy and community in our lives, regardless of whether or not those moments are tied to religious beliefs or not. 

I thought this book was thought provoking and relatable for me. It answered questions I didn't know I had, created even more questions, and did it all it a readable way. 4.5/5 stars

Lines of note:

Light itself seems to be almost universally sacred. (I hesitate to use the word universally about anything because, as my dad taught me, we only have information about Earth, nowhere near the whole universe.) How often is light used as a metaphor for hope or for remembrance? How many rituals center around a candle, that small, short-lived sun of human invention? (page 112)

I'm writing this knowing that tomorrow I will walk the dog in the dark for all three of her walks. Sunlight is definitely crucial in my life. 

It’s this rejoicing at survival that’s at the heart of every birthday party. For most of history, survival was harder. Children perished. A first birthday was not a given. Each passing year, each step closer to adulthood, was a relief not to be taken for granted, something truly worthy of celebration. That’s what a birthday is: the realization that time is passing but we are still alive. (page 152)

I think this goes to my point from above. Some birthday are a reflection that we are still alive (when my twin niece and nephew were born super premature, we definitely did not take their birthday parties for granted for the first few years), but most are just a time together and no one really thinks about the symbolism of blowing out a candle to say goodbye to the passage of time. 

Each of us, no matter our beliefs or lack thereof, is wrestling with the deep knowledge that whatever comes next, this, what we are experiencing at this moment, will end with total finality. (page 211)

I have read so many books about the death industry and dying this year. I thought it was fitting that this book also brought it back around to death and dying. 

Every day, the number of books I have not read gnaws at me. (page 267)

I think Sagan and I would get along just fine. 

Hat mentions:

This was a kind of hat tip to the ways of our forebears. (page 35)

There are reliable tropes year in and year out: the cake, the games, maybe the paper There are reliable tropes year in and year out: the cake, the games, maybe the paper hats. (page 140) 

I do know I had a children’s book that was meant to shed some straightforward, scientific light on the subject. The illustrated sperm had top hats, I remember, and an orgasm was described as something like the feeling of sneezing when you really, really have to sneeze but “much better” (which I learned a long time later was a comparison previously made by Alfred Kinsey). (page 172-173)

Word I looked up:

demonym (page 102) - a word used to describe the natives or inhabitants of a particular country, state, city, etc.