While washing the bathroom floor today it occurred to me that what I was doing was not obvious. There was nothing to gain from it, my immune system could probably handle any pathogen on the surface and I am not in the habit of licking the floor or even walking barefoot on it. My sense of aesthetics could also put up with a filthy floor just fine. Neither the floor nor the house are in my possession and the landlord would not deduct anything from the deposit over reasonable wear and tear, at least in theory. With no threat of monetary or moral loss and no incentives to gain, my actions seem difficult to justify, especially since washing the floor can be rather taxing and does not make for good entertainment. My housemates, who never washed the floor, seemed to represent a modern, pragmatic approach to phenomena such as floors getting dirty: deal only with that which benefits me or removes harm from me. So what was my reason for washing the floor? (I reflected upon this between bowls of hot water.) It seems the chore was underpinned by a deep sense of duty, a primal conviction about the correctitude of a clean floor, sans rational justification. In fact, reason seemed to be in suspension and play no part in my decision-making process. Perhaps, since the rent-year is coming to an end, I did what I did to gain a sense of closure - here washing the floor would function as a ritual, an action the only use of which is to draw a boundary, between boyhood and manhood, winter and spring, life and death.

The world of today is in dire need of rituals. Their lingering presence is cherished. Think of how the status of a man who allegedly has lost his virginity or did some kind of drug changes in a group of his peers, consider how we gear up towards daylight saving time changes or how we scatter the ashes obtained from the incinerated corpse of a family member. While sex, drugs, time and death do have real impact on our lives (duh), the way we celebrate certain aspects of those is reminiscent of a time when we would not only believe, but act out belief, not merely passively recognising a cosmic order, but (re?)creating it through participation.

But enough of rituals, the floor-washing had a more immediate meaning to it. It represented self-imposed duty, a phenomenon of will, independent of and sometimes hostile to reason. This way of living your life, i.e. allowing for unrationality, seems to be mostly abandoned by modern man. Whether that is a good thing or not is in the eye of the beholder and I will not share my strong opinions here. But perhaps you would care to disagree with my observations?