Fragrance as Punctuation

There’s a stick of incense I burn after cleaning on Friday afternoons. It’s done with much less pomp and circumstance than you’d think considering how often I talk about it. As soon as that stick is lit, the work week is over.1 Red sauce and pasta is made, weekend plans are sketched out, and thus, my week is punctuated.

Incense, candles, and fragrance have been for used for thousands of years to demarcate time and transcend the ordinary into ceremony.

In the most practical sense, medieval monks would regulate their entire day using candle clocks - a candle with marked lines denoting the passage of minutes. Sophisticated versions have a small metal pin that drops a pin with a ding! when the flame reaches it.

Fragrance was also incorporated into time-keeping practices. In Ancient Egypt, priests burned kyphi at dusk, an incense blended of aromatic ingredients including honey, myrrh, and raisins (!!), among other things.

Intuitively, these traditions understand something that neuroscience is now just beginning to explain: how scent is hardwired to the part of your brain that processes memory, feeling, and emotion. Scent bypasses the part of your brain that needs to make sense of something and steam rolls straight to the feeling.

Fragrance - lighting a candle, incense, setting up your essential oil burner - signifies the start of a ritual or just the start of a new chapter by speaking straight to your body’s nervous system.

I do have some fragrance rituals of my own. Like the Friday incense I mentioned before, they’re not done with the flair of an Ancient Egyptian priest at sundown, but the sluggish movements of a mom who volunteered for too many school PTA events.

Incense sticks are my go-to on Sunday mornings. Sundays are firmly a “no plans” day in my house, meant to offer a reset; if I can steal an hour with a book on the couch and dainty tendril of incense smoke drifting nearby, I’ve made it.

Lighting a candle when I get home from work is my permission slip to chill. I shared my favorite hurricane last week to add to safety and performance in large rooms, but here it is again. This hurricane says: no errant husky tails were harmed in the burning of this candle.

Flipping the reeds on a diffuser weekly is part of my cleaning rituals. It’s akin to turning over an hourglass - marking the passage of another week through scent. “Like oil through the reeds, these are the days of our lives.” (I’ll see myself out).

This has been a newer addition to the mix - one supported by a nightly reminder on my phone that says “spray the lavender broom spray” at 9:45 pm, a dictated typo I could fix but don’t for some reason. The idea here is the lavender will help me sleep better; I’ve been inconsistent but always feel like I have my shit together if I remember.

Ritual is the pin drop of a record. Ritual creates edges and boundaries, between which many creatives know the best work is done - not in spite of, but because of.

In the same way that punctuation gives shape to a sentence, marking a dalliance, extending it, or connecting two thoughts together - fragrance can serve as a ritual to bookend our day.

Ideally over time the signal will be automatic to your mind. Even if you don’t take “the pause” and light each candle with intention, the fragrance will remind you once did.