my word of the year practice
Every year, for many years now, I pick a word to help me define what I hope to create for myself for the year ahead. (Last year, I couldn’t pick just one, so I had two: BOLD and EXPERIMENT. It’s because of these words that I answered an email I received on January 2nd, 2020 from a publisher I’d never heard of, and said yes to their proposal on a subject I wasn’t entirely sure I was ready to write about. And yet, my bold, experiment will be released this coming fall. Words of the year, it must be said, work in mysterious ways.)
I’ve found that this practice of choosing a word — especially in lieu of resolutions — to be particularly powerful. Sometimes I’ve picked the word; other times, the word has picked me. This year, only one word kept coming up: my 2021 word is BRIGHT.
The reasons I pick my words are usually incredibly personal and dependent on circumstance and what’s going on in my life. That said, one thing I always do (and recommend to everyone who chooses a word for their year) is to look up the word’s definition. I’ve often found that when I do this, there’s often a meaning that I hadn’t really thought about. (So, for example, when several years ago, I chose the word INSPIRE, it wasn’t until I looked it up that I realized that it had the additional meaning, “to inhale.” That additional definition felt like it added more purpose to the word, and so I was even more inspired to keep it.). This year, the search for the definition of the word BRIGHT was particularly productive:
BRIGHT: shining, glowing in appearance; intelligent; hopeful; joyful; famous, outstanding; vivid in colour
I loved this.
Once you’ve found your word’s definitions, I strongly recommend making your word as present as possible. If you’ve been visiting Chookooloonks for a while, you know I’m a big fan of vision boards, and I always revisit mine around this time of the year, culling images that don’t feel as pertinent to the coming year, and adding ones that do. And then I hang my board in a pretty prominent place. But this year I’ve also added a meditative practice: using a mantra that is based on my word, every morning before I get out of bed, I repeat my mantra, using prayer beads to count as I say it on each bead. (This practice is based on my own faith, tweaked a bit to make it feel personal; however, many faiths use prayer beads and mantras or prayers — if this is something that you might be interested in, there are tons of videos out there that can show how to use various types of beads.) At the end of the year, when I pick a new word for 2022, I’ll come up with a new phrase for my mantra then.
Doing this practice has helped me set my intention for my day, and ensure that I don’t stray too far from my word as I go through my routine. Now halfway through the first month of the year, I’ve found that I’m far more likely to think about the word during the day than I was in years past. This helps form my decisions, reminds me of what to feel grateful for, and so on.
I’d love to hear: are you word-of-the-year pickers? How do you make your word feel more present?
A little about the new book.