Our daily rituals and obligations often pile on top of each other, one after another after another, until we find ourselves just moving through the week almost without thinking. There’s breakfast to make, lunch to prepare and pack, and a whole collection of artifacts to pack into the car and haul off to work. Our journeys to work or school are automatic. Almost regardless of our profession, each day seems to be some kind of facsimile of previous days — yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that. Our drive home might be punctuated with a stop at this or that store, but it’s usually like the drive to work: automatic. Once home, we take kids to rehearsals, events, and practices, make our dinner, help with homework, take the garbage out, put away leftovers, and carve out a few minutes of free time before heading to bed. The next day, it starts again.

With our head down, we push through these days with less thought than we should, and suddenly, we have a daughter in college and a son nearly in high school. Half a lifetime — more — passes without us noticing.

How to break this cycle? With intentionality that starts in the small things. Purposeful choices that break the cycles we fall into. Or as in today’s case, fix the cycle: my mountain bike needed some work, so I spent some time lubricating my thru axles (when was the last time I did that?), dialing in my derailleur (as most sold in the last five years or so are, my bike is a one-by — no front derailleur), and putting new tires on the bike. A simple task that stated a cascade of variations to a normal Wednesday evening.

With no more soccer practice, Wednesdays are free, so I took the bike out for its first spin on the new, more aggressively knobby tires. Eater to feel the difference, I nonetheless started out at my usual tempo, slowing at all the sharp turns that had, at one point or another, slide my bike from under me. Old habits and all. But a few minutes in, I started trusting the tires more, making faster and more aggressive turns. “It was like a new bike,” I told K when I got back when she had a break from helping E with his math. “When your tires need replacing, we’ll get you these more aggressive tires. You’ll feel much more secure,” I assured her.

Shortly after that, the rituals returned. Wednesday night is garbage night. “Come on, E, let’s get the garbage and recycling to the street.” Cleaning up dinner items, I saw the dishwasher was almost full, prompting another, somewhat more annoying, ritual. “E, go up to your room and bring down all the dirty dishes you have up there.” When I saw how many spoons he had in his hand, the mysterious lack of spoons I’d been noticing for the last couple of days suddenly made sense. I fussed at him — lightly, playfully (I hope that’s how he took it: hard to tell with young teens) — and realized that we’d just fallen back into ritual.

Yet is ritual so bad? Can we go through life like that and cultivate self-awareness? Of course. It just takes intentionality. Like everything.