I spent New Year’s Eve and Day in bed with a wicked cold (caught from the germ-tastic aquarium, no doubt) and I’m a little wobbly today, but I’m up. Not quite up to leaving the house yet, but at least I’m (literally) standing at my standing desk as I type this.
And I’m thinking about my word of the year. Lots of people do it–I certainly didn’t come up with it–but this tool has been helpful to me in years past.
This year it’s easy: REPLENISH
It’s easy because that’s what my new collection of essays is about. Each month, I’m trying a new creative endeavor in the hopes of replenishing my spirit, body, mind, and soul, and at the end of the month, I write about how it went. Without spoiling the last essay which I sent out on the last day of the year, the Reading Month went way better than I’d expected it to.
This month, January, is about Home, making and shaping it into the best place it can be. It’s funny, yesterday was the first day of the new year, and my reading challenge was officially over as the home challenge geared up, but because I was sick, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I just wanted to read, because the refound habit of reading deeply really sunk in over December.
And I wanted to read, specifically, a memoir about building home (DO leave me a comment if you know a great one). I loved Dee Williams’s Big Tiny, and I wanted something like that. I found Hammer Head by Nina MacLaughlin, a book about a journalist who becomes a carpenter when writing clickbait got too much. It’s exactly what I wanted. It wasn’t until I’d click Buy that I realized I was feeding the January challenge–I’d completely forgotten.
I loved realizing that the reading challenge will follow me into each of the next eleven challenges. This should have been obvious, but it wasn’t, and it was delightful to discover. (For people new to the challenge, I’m replenishing my creative spirit by doing things I want to do in my downtime instead of reading social media or frittering away time watching TV or other mindless activities. One reader thought I was doing this as my job, which I wish I was wealthy enough to do. Nope, still working 40+ hours a week writing. But I can’t complain about that because I love love love love it.)
So. What’s YOUR word for 2018? Leave a comment – I’d love to know.
Practice
Act
Mine is ‘space’: Creating it, using it, claiming it. First time I’ve actively chosen a word for the year, and I think I like it 🙂
“Less is more”. I’ve not found word-of-the-year very helpful in the past, but this year I have a very strong commitment to this motto; it’s risen up from deep in me and applies to so much.
My word for 2018 is UNTETHERED. Gonna see where that takes me!