One Word 365

For each new morning with its light,

For rest and shelter of the night,

For health and food, for love and friends

For everything Thy goodness sends.

~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Rather than setting resolutions for the new year, each January I select a word to focus on during the coming months.  For the past month I have been all set with a word, knowing exactly what I want, just waiting for January 1st to roll around.  In order to spare you a lot of boring back and forth, I will skip to the end where I shelved my original word and decided to go with the word that continued to present itself to me.

Gratitude.

Because I am the super nerd that I am, I went over to Merriam Webster to see what they had to say about my word.  They define gratitude as "the state of being grateful".  It immediately became clear why this word was swirling around in my head.  I am not ungrateful for the blessings in my life, but I do not live in a state of gratitude.  I feel strongly convicted that there is room in my core for change.  The following quote by JFK sums up exactly how I am feeling.

As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them.

I don't want to just say thank you for the things in my life.  I want to change my perspective so that I wake each morning grateful for a good nights sleep instead of groaning that I don't want to get up.  I want to be grateful for the legs that carry me down the stairs in my warm, cozy house instead of grumbling that the coffee maker is ALL THE WAY DOWN STAIRS.  Don't get me wrong, I don't want to turn into Mary Poppins, but I have an abundance of blessings that I need to start acknowledging.  

Do you have any words that you will be focusing on this year?  Please leave them in the comment and hop on over to http://oneword365.com/ to find other members of your tribe!

Intention

I am a terrible writer.  It's true, I am.  Not because my content is awful or because I make heinous grammatical errors (I do) but because I have absolutely no consistency.  For as long as I can remember, I have been in love with the written word.  The last two decades of my life have been spent jotting down quotes and reading everything I could get my hands on.  I was the nerdy girl in the corner or the coffee house by herself, pausing only to scribble down inspiration on a napkin.  Maybe one day I'll actually do something with them and be the next J.K. Rowling.  Which is totally possible except not at all because I am a terrible writer.  The problem with my writing is the exact same as my biggest overall flaw.

I lack follow-through.  By lack I mean, absolutely none.  I have tons of great, inspired ideas.  I have flashes of brilliance when I sit down and the words that pour out of me are pure magic.  I sit back and feel energy and exhaustion coursing through my veins simultaneously.  I look at the screen and I know that I can do this.  I can write things that challenge and inspire people.  I can publish my novel.  I get up and walk away from the computer on cloud nine.  

And then I do nothing.  If I am being a super slacker, I might not even touch it again for weeks.  If I am at least attempting to stay on track, I will sit down and try to connect the brilliant moments into something semi resembling a completed story.  Those forced words are complete crap.  I know it, they know it and every person who reads the manuscript knows it.  I throw my hands up in frustration and just walk away from it completely, leaving it to collect dust in the darkest corner of my hard drive.  Substitute blog post for novel and it's the same thing all over again.  Brilliant ideas, almost none get finished and posted.

My word of the year for 2014 is 'Intention'.  My goal was/is to stop being haphazard and make intentional choices in order to accomplish the things that I want to accomplish.  I was going to buckle down and do things.

We are halfway through the year and thus far, I have failed miserably.   I didn't post anything here for the first five months and I haven't touched my novel once.  Granted, there have been a few unforeseen complications, but I am not here to make excuses.  I am here to stop and commit to spending the second half of the year embracing the word I chose.  So that is what I am going to do.  I make no guarantees that anything I write will be decent, but I will at least begin by actually finishing and posting the things I write.  It's progress, right?

Word of the Year

New Years resolutions have always been a lost concept to me.  If I didn't have the drive or intent to make a change when I woke up on December 31st, am I really going to wake up with new resolve to change because it's January 1st now?  Not likely.  I do believe that change is good though and my compromise has been to choose a word of the year each year.  Why am I writing about my word of the year in April?  Because this year, my word is 'awareness'.

In the past I have chosen words like 'fearless' and 'present' that are more easily defined and focused on.  When it came time to start thinking about my word for this year, I bounced many around in my brain and 'awareness' kept surfacing.  Awareness?  Am I supposed to raise awareness?  Be aware of my surroundings?  I mean, I usually am.  I pay attention. I don't wander into dark parking garages alone.   No, that's not going to work for me.  I continued to focus on other words trying to make one that I liked better feel right.  I realized during this that my inner voice is FAR more stubborn than I am.  And so my word for this year was born.  I had no idea just how much it was going to shape the coming months.

We are only one-quarter of the way through the year and I have already seen huge progress and had many "light-bulb" moments where everything suddenly makes sense and becomes clear.  Some I have written about, some I have not, and they are too numerous to share every one.  As I was sitting here this morning, having yet another of these moments (more to come on that later), I was suddenly so grateful that this word chose me this year.  That it kept coming to the surface and demanding to be chosen when I wasn't sure that it was the right one.  Because it is the right one.  In fact, it just might be the most perfect one yet.