Choosing my word for 2024: Seeking a word to define my next year

I don’t believe in new year’s resolutions. Mostly, I find them to be guilt-inducing, heavy things: a punishment for all the stuff I don’t think I’ve done well enough in the past twelve months. I stopped setting them years ago, knowing a futile exercise when I saw it. That said, I do still think it’s important to mark the trajectory of another year. I’m a big believer in ritual so when I stopped setting new year’s resolutions I introduced another way of marking the passage of time: a word of the year.

I’ve never shared with anyone my habit of choosing a word to encapsulate all my hopes and goals and intentions for the year, but it’s something I’ve done for the past few. It provides a focus, a small and gentle reminder of the direction I want things to head in for the next year. Most years, the word itself has been an obvious choice. For 2022, the word was healing. I’d finished chemotherapy on the very last day of 2021, capping off four months of intensely gruelling cancer treatment, and knew that my body and mind needed the time and space to recover from the trauma it had been through. For 2023, I picked—probably unsurprisingly, given this blog—the word rest. Healing was an intensive process and I wanted to prioritise rest as I headed back to ‘normal’ life post-cancer. This year ended up being busier than I had expected and maybe wanted, but that only made my chosen word more helpful, more important.

Now though, as I look forward to 2024 I find myself uncertain of which word to choose. I feel at something of a crossroads. I don’t want to be defined by having had cancer but at the same time cancer altered every single facet of my existence in some way, and the past two years have been shaped by my recovery from it. And while my health will continue to be an ongoing priority, I’m in remission (knock on wood, please) and living a life that isn’t entirely focused on survival right now.

So as I’ve been settling back into some sense of normalcy, different kinds of questions are starting to surface. I’ve been back at work full-time for more than a year, in the same field I’ve been in in some way or another for over a decade. In today’s economy I’m very grateful for my job, but I am also coming to the point of wondering what the next step is. One thing that came out of rest in 2023 was a rededication to my creative pursuits: photography and writing mainly, but also things like crochet and baking and gardening. It’s reminding me of the things that really fill my cup and forcing me to reckon with the bigger existential questions around what I want to do with my life.

Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that rededicating myself to my creative pursuits is forcing me to reckon with what I don’t want to do with my life. And the reality is that the future I’m beginning to suss out doesn’t look anything like the future I thought I wanted four years ago, before the pandemic and cancer ripped the ground out from under me.

In fact, it looks a hell of a lot more like the future I pictured for myself when I was four years old.

I have this memory, almost more sensation than actual recollection. It must have been the autumn of pre-K, my very first year of school. My teacher was Mrs. Collins, a lovely woman with a fondness for denim dresses (it was, after all, 1995). She took us on a field trip to a forest near her house, and our whole gaggle of children tramped around in the woods before going to her house for cookies.

(Obviously, this seems not true—surely it crosses some boundary to have kindergarten students in your personal home? But also, it was the nineties.)

I don’t even really remember that day, other than it being the most fun I had ever had. I loved being in the woods, which in my memory was an endless forest of old, gnarled, Disney-style fairytale trees and not the small stand of young trees more likely in this part of Ontario. I think I remember mushrooms being pointed out to us, and moss, and a creek. It was maybe raining. Mostly, I remember wanting.

I wanted to stay there. I didn’t want to go back to my scheduled school day. I didn’t want to go home. I wanted to stay in the woods, in this magical place where a whole new, bigger world presented itself. 

I had tasted the Other, and from that moment on I wanted more.

My life since is marked by my seeking the Other, and the times and places where I’ve found it are encoded in my brain: an overgrown and forgotten apple tree near my babysitter’s house; a cliff face covered in strange velvety black lichens near the offgrid trailer I spent my childhood summers at; the copse of birches beside the big tobogganing hill in the suburbia I grew up in; a hidden storm ditch near my high school; the huge meadow ringing with cicadas near my summer camp; a cistern dug deep below the ancient citadel of Mycenae in the Peloponnese; the threshold of the unidentified building I helped excavated at the Bronze Age site of Gournia; the red-tinged lake at my in-law’s cottage. Shivery, frissons, depth. Moments and places and experiences that feel removed, a step back from our world. 

Like that four year old kid emerging from the woods, I again want that Other. I want more. I want to go a level deeper. I want to dig myself into the dirt.

I’m not sure what this all means, in the end. I know that seeking the Other is uncertain—it’s dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. I know that for me, seeking the Other means peeling back the fear and doing it anyway. Building on what I’ve learned from rest to give more space in my life to the Other: to writing and risk-taking and time spent in nature. To being unafraid of the muck. To making the scary decisions that are necessary to build that space, to do what I need to do to bring in the stillness where the Other can enter. To prioritise the life I’m beginning to define the edges of.

So there it is, the word of 2024: other. A seeking word for a seeking year in these waning days of December.

Until next time.