THE DAILY WRITE

Starting Today I’m Deleting the Word “Favorite” From My Vocabulary

Yellow was once my favorite color.

June 6th: What’s your favorite color? Why, and how is it represented in your life?

“You’ve got to come and see this!”

I leave my writing behind on the kitchen table and rush to join my partner on the front porch.

“They opened up!” He’s pointing to the garden plot beneath our front window.

The Icelandic poppies that were mere green, furry pods yesterday have transformed and are bopping their giant-petalled heads in the morning breeze. They are a blazing cadmium red, almost as if giving the finger to the bloated-grey sky above them.

“Oh, my god! We should have pulled up lawn chairs and watched them bloom.” Of course, I know there is no sure way to know the exact moment those poppies chose to pop last night, but a girl can dream.

I snapped a few pictures of the freshly-born blooms and returned to my article about my favorite color…

…except something was wrong. Everything I wrote sounded false to my heart, as though yellow was now taking a back seat to a new idea.

As wrote and deleted, wrote and deleted, I realized I was experiencing a reaction to the word favorite. After the excitement of being witness to the heart-throbbing poppy, I began to wonder whether thinking of something as my favorite deletes other possibilities.

I don’t care for the color brown, yet I love the feeling and scent of deep, rich soil, or the smoothness of polished oak.

In truth, it’s not the color that’s my favorite but rather the feeling it evokes. Until I saw the poppies this morning, I was ready to write about the ripe flesh of mangoes, the heavy heads of sunflowers, and the buttery wings of the Sulphur butterfly. I was ready to declare my undying devotion to the color yellow.

(I bow down to yellow in this poem).

I am ever so grateful to Dawn Smiles for this prompt and the surprise of the morning poppy. It forced me to examine my default thinking around exclusivity. What a travesty to nail myself inside a box of a favorite color, food, movie, song, season, flower, sweater, or scent.

When I declare something my favorite, I am closing the door on the possibility of something unexpected coming in to wow me with its unique beauty or yes, even ugliness.

When I declare something my favorite, it becomes ex-clusive to one thing. I don’t want to pin myself down to a favorite anything. I want to blow off the doors of limitations and stand in the midst of curiosity. I want inclusivity to be my guide.

What if today, I allow myself to be blown away by the cadmium red of the poppy and tomorrow, the orange breast of a robin. How about the day after that, I celebrate the hazel of my lover’s eyes. The possibilities become limitless when there are no favorites and I like that. I like that A LOT!

What if instead of saying something is my favorite, I shift my thinking toward appreciation and gratitude. Today, I am grateful for the exciting energy of the Icelandic poppy.

I don’t think I will ever lose my affinity for yellow. It will forever be tied to warm memories of bees covered in pollen and the summer dress I refused to take off when I was five. My partner painted the walls of my writing room yellow and I feel gratitude for his thoughtfulness and the feeling of possibility that washes over me when I breathe in the smell of fresh paint.

Key Message: As of today, the word, favorite is no longer part of my vocabulary. I challenge myself to see the possibility of amazing in everything I encounter.

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