One Word

I don't do New Year's Resolutions. Nothing against them but I never found myself keeping them and it seems to me that you can, and should, set new goals at anytime that you realize you need to. So...I just don't do that. For several years now, though, I have been choosing a word of the year. It is just a simple idea that really appealed to me and that I have come to truly love. At the beginning of each year you choose a word (for the past few years I have actually made it a phrase but this year I am returning to an actual word) that you make your own for the year. For me it is a word to focus on. To grab for when I feel I am drowning, to celebrate when I am doing well, to ground me in what I wish to do and be. I say that but it is not actually a thing I want to DO or an act that can be accomplished. I will not achieve a state of this word. I will just strive for it. I will remember it. I will pray for it. I will reach for it. I will work toward it. I will miss it - by leaps and bounds. I will get tired of it and even abandon it some days. But it will be my word and I will hold it in my heart this year.

I don't think I have ever done this before but my word for this year is almost a reaction to my phrase from last year. I loved my phrase and I needed my phrase, but I also need to move on from it now. My phrase has been: Nevertheless She Persisted. And I have. Just barely, it feels like on this New Years Eve as I sit alone in my parent's house with some new odd physical ailment driving me crazy and with a million things on my mind. Despite everything I kept going. This past year has been awful and I have needed a phrase I could grab onto, some days even just with the tips of my fingernails.

I have decided that is not enough for me anymore. I obviously need to keep going. I know there are still going to be days when just persisting will be all I can hope to do. But my focus this year - the word in my heart - is not going to be to just make it despite it all. I want more. Two separate friends of mine during this past year focused some attention on this word and I loved it so I  am stealing it from them to use this year:

This year I want to flourish. I have thought a lot about this word and what it means. At the top of this post is a definition of the word. To thrive, to do well, to have a period of productivity or excellence. These are the things I want for myself and for my world. I have realized, however, that I have to stop trying to dictate exactly what that might mean and learn to flourish wherever I find myself. As I searched for images of the word flourish another word that showed up with it a lot was bloom and I like those two words together - to bloom where you are planted - to flourish where you are. That is what I seek. 

I have spent a lot of time and energy trying to make my life look a certain way. The way I wanted it to look. And the fact that it does not look that way has caused me great pain and disappointment. What I seek to find this coming year is a way to flourish in what my life DOES look like. To grow and thrive where I am rather than where I thought I should be. I have NO IDEA what this year will hold for me. There are so many things up in the air right now about my future I can't even process them in my head let alone begin to write about them yet. So rather than try to create a picture of what I want my life to look like, I simply want to flourish within the life I have.

A print of this has been hanging in my house for several years now. This year it has renewed meaning for me and I hope it will begin to become more and more true as I begin to bloom and flourish in new ways