"One Little Word" challenge: Year 2

A year ago, I blogged here about the “One Little Word” project, which I learned about from writer/artist Ali Edwards’ blog. It poses the challenge of finding one word on which to hitch your star for the upcoming year. Or, as Ali explains it, “Essentially the idea is to choose a word (or let it choose you) that has the potential to make an impact on your life…a single word to focus on over the course of the year.”

I chose the word “possible,” knowing as I did so that as an adjective with which to forecast an entire year, my word ran the risk of being so neutral as to be incontrovertible. “Anything’s possible,” I told myself. “Sure, I guess that’s possible.” “Could it be possible?” I felt a little like I was copping out on the intent of the challenge by choosing such a wishy-washy word, but it still felt like the right one to me.

Being new to the “one little word” challenge, I’m not sure if I’m supposed to evaluate my word choice or not from the perspective I’ve gained one year later. In a way, my response now to the word “possible” is the same now as it was when I chose it: “Possible? I suppose so. Anything’s possible, right?”

And in the year just passed, some things were possible and happened; others that seemed possible did not come to pass. A year ago, I looked ahead with uncertainty to various aspects of my life, unsure of what outcomes were likely to lie ahead, and that seemed like the best I could do as a new year began: admit the infinite range of possibilities.

A year later, I’m feeling compelled to try the same thing again, only this time a word came to me unbidden: “succeed.” Definitely not the noun form, “success,” but the verb. And with it comes the grade-school definition of a verb: an action word. Success is an end in itself, a goal reached, a conclusion safely arrived at: but succeed, an action word, is a process.

In choosing it as my Word for 2011, I take on the responsibility of making it relevant. I may not reach every measure of success I dream of in 2011, but I will take actions throughout the next twelve months that count toward the process of succeeding. I won’t arrive at every final goal I hold in my heart, but I will require myself to demonstrate more steps than missteps, more actions than reactions, more positives than negatives, more good moods than bad moods. In this way, I’ll try to make every day an act within the process of succeeding. Not success; not that ultimate final goal. But succeed: the ongoing process of executing actions with positive outcomes.

The "one little word" challenge

Shortly after New Year’s, I found my way to this blog, which details the clever creative exercise of choosing one word to characterize the upcoming year. Of course, the choice is aspirational, since the year hasn’t happened yet: ideally, it serves as a guidepost and a benchmark for the year you hope to have as well as perhaps the year you anticipate having.

For me, there’s something so provocative about choosing one word for anything, let alone the character of the upcoming twelve months. Limiting words has always proved to be one of my greatest professional and creative challenges: on the macro scale, I consistently run over the word count prescribed by my editors for various assignments, and on the micro scale, one reason I get so much enjoyment from Twitter is the challenge it poses to frame cogent thoughts in 140 characters. When I was a copywriter, one of my primary responsibilities was writing direct-mail pieces and other short-form advertising pieces, and for me, short headlines and punchy blurbs were the hardest part of the job. I often said I’d rather be assigned one of the company’s 170-page catalogs than a 250-word direct mail pitch.

But I do like the one-word format of these challenges, similar to the one Elizabeth Gilbert describes in Eat, Pray, Love where she tries first to find a single word for the city of Rome and then a single word for herself. So often, the words we come up with in these challenges are both too restrictive – because who wants to winnow themselves down to a one-word label? -- and, paradoxically, too generic, because there are so many words for our lives that no one could possibly dispute. Several years ago, members of my former book group decided that the theme for our reading choices in the upcoming year should be “resilience.” I couldn’t resist a snicker at that: aren’t all works of fiction or narrative nonfiction on some level about resilience, either the presence or the absence thereof? Couldn’t it be argued that without at least a modicum of resilience, there’s no one left to describe a conflict?

But in fact, a lot of the words we might use for the grand themes in our lives have this same wide-focus problem. At a writers’ workshop in which we paused our writing to expand our creativity with a painting exercise, I overheard a participant say to the artist-in-residence, “I chose yellow. Isn’t yellow the color of change?” The artist responded, “Isn’t every color the color of change?"

In the blog entry that I was consulting for guidance on this practice, some of the choices were predictable – serenity, gratitude, hope – but their lack of uniqueness makes them no less valid. These are the themes almost all of us would wish to have touch our lives in an as-yet-unexperienced twelve months. And there were others on the list I hadn’t thought of: clarity, prosperous, wholehearted, gather.

For myself, I’m still thinking it over, but I keep coming back to my first choice being “possible.” At first I thought “possibilities,” but in a way that seems too biased in its positive connotations. “Possibilities” surely sound like all good things, and I want something a little bit grittier, a little bit more willing to acknowledge that good things may or may not happen. Even though it is almost the same word, “possible” sounds more neutral to me, and therefore more honest. It’s possible that I’ll have some degree of literary success this year; it’s possible I’ll get swine flu. It’s possible my family will get to go on a dream vacation this summer; it’s possible we’ll postpone that another year. Terrorist attacks are possible and so are new friends.

So my word, at least for now, is “possible.” Perhaps I too have cheated by choosing one that’s hard to argue with. Of course things are possible; how could they not be, other than in the most hopeless of situations? But maybe that’s the point right now. Good things or bad things might happen to me and around me, but nothing feels hopeless. It all feels, well, possible.