At Boston's South Station in mid-June, a group of Norwegian football fans created what could have been an awkward moment. The fans sat one behind another on an escalator, leaned forward and back in synchrony, "rowing" through the station as if the moving metal stairs were ferrying them across the North Sea.
By every ordinary rule of public life, the South Station scene should have induced annoyance or caused embarrassment. Instead, commuters stopped. Phones came out. Some locals took up an imaginary oar and joined in. The fans were performing the "Viking Row," a ritual that has followed Norway through the World Cup. It carries the theatrical shape of something ancient, but its social force is contemporary. Its power comes from participation itself: people finding one another in public, copying a gesture, repeating it, teaching it, altering it, and making it feel like their own.
To be sure, the Norwegians are not alone in broadcasting their rituals during this FIFA World Cup. In Houston, thousands of Dutch supporters marched through the heat in a river of orange on the Oranje Fanwalk, joined by almost anyone willing to enter the procession. After matches, Japanese fans once again stayed behind to collect trash from the stadium rows, continuing a practice that has become one of the most recognizable rituals in global sport.
These moments captivate us because they show shared identity becoming visible through behavior. At a time when the lack of belonging has become one of the dominant anxieties of public life, shared rituals are more than merely charming. Workplaces measure belonging. Schools design programs around it. Politicians invoke it. Digital platforms promise it while often leaving people lonelier. Across institutions, there is now broad recognition that people are hungry for connection, but far less understanding of how humans build connection.
In 1912, French sociologist Émile Durkheim gave us a language to understand why these moments have such force. Writing more than a century ago about religious life, he described the phenomenon "collective effervescence": the emotional intensity that emerges when people gather, synchronize their bodies and attention, and experience themselves as part of a larger whole. Of course, Durkheim was not writing about soccer supporters in train stations, but the concept applies here as well.
Magic, however, cannot be manufactured. Anyone who has sat through a mandatory team-building exercise knows the difference between a ritual that binds and a program that irritates. The missing ingredient is ownership.
Why? People value what they have had a hand in making.
Organizations spend enormous resources trying to create a sense of belonging from the center through onboarding experiences, engagement surveys, retreats, values statements, and culture programs. Some of this work has value, but much of it begins from the wrong premise. It assumes belonging can be delivered fully formed to a recipient.
What the World Cup leaves behind is mostly familiar: flags, painted faces, a month of national feeling. What's worth keeping is smaller and stranger. On a Boston escalator, a few people pull imaginary oars, and the commuters around them reach for an oar of their own.
No one handed the Norwegians a way to belong. They made one together, oar by oar, and left it open for the rest of us. We belong most deeply to what we help make.
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