Writing Prompt
What Words Will You Carry This Year?
Circling back to a prompt from one year ago
At the very end of 2021, Trista Signe Ainsworth told us about the three words she had chosen to carry with her in 2022, and she asked us to contemplate and share our responses to this question:
“What wondrous words will help you create a beautiful life all around you in 2022?”
My own little reflection
This afternoon I looked back on my own response to the prompt, and my words for 2022 were “calm” and “health.” I wrote about taking a relaxing New Year’s Day walk along the snow-covered streets of my neighborhood with my girlfriend. It turns out that we also spent time that week playing the card game Skip-Bo together for the first time, and we ended up playing that quite a lot throughout the year.
Thinking of my chosen words today, I would say that I found calm in writing first-person essays about my life and embracing quiet, everyday things that I experienced and/or remembered. I know that I did a lot to pursue improvement in my health — and this is an ongoing process that I have to consciously find patience around.
Expanding perspective through a word or phrase
I happened upon this Medium story by Deepak Chopra today in which he suggests that we choose “an all-embracing lifestyle” rather than making individual resolutions for the new year. He wants us to move toward seeing ourselves and our lives as more whole, rather than more fragmentary.
But he has a phrase for the year, too. He says, “The best lifestyle can be described in a single phrase, waking up.”
When he asks us to ponder how we wake up to what he calls our “infinite potential that belongs to every human being,” I think he gives us some interesting food for thought. Maybe choosing words or phrases to carry into this year is a way to consider our potential as the calendar offers a new beginning.
Looking back and/or forward
Do you have any wondrous words or phrases you’d like to carry into the coming days, weeks, and months? Maybe those words are always flowing from your pencil, pen, touchscreen, or keyboard — or maybe they’re words you think but seldom say.
Did you respond to Trista’s prompt last year, or write in some other way about the beginning of 2022?
Whether you’d like to look forward or back or both, I invite you to share your thoughts here in Thank You Notes (let me know in the comments if you’d like to be added as a writer) or anywhere you might prefer to write about some of the words you hold close to you.
I’m tagging a few writers who I thought might be interested in posting on this subject… If I didn’t tag you, it’s just because I was trying to not go overboard on the tags!
Jeanine Tew, Sharing Randomly, Mona S Gable, Henry India Holden💖, Gerald Washington, Linda Ng, Selma, Connie Song, Jesse Wilson, Shameem Anwar, Shereen Bingham, Steffany Ritchie, Katie Michaelson, Lanu Pitan, Vidya Sury, Collecting Smiles, Lucia Landini, John C. Davis, Barb Dalton, Allisonn Church, Mercedes O'Leary, Julie KingGood
Wishing you the best in 2023, and my word, by the way, is presence. I may come up with another as I think about it more. :)
