Nudge Words: One Little Word Reveal #OLW #SOL24

In his New Year’s message, former President Barak Obama wrote:

As we begin 2024, I’m hopeful for brighter days ahead. Let’s all do our part to create change in our communities and build a better world for everyone.

Barak Obama

The message implies something I noticed is a theme about 2023: Folks had a bad year. We lived through the hottest year on record. The Russian invasion of Ukraine will soon enter year three. We’re witnessing ongoing violence in the Middle East, not just in Gaza, but in Syria too. There’s an ongoing genocide in Myanmar. Like many, I worry about the existential threat to democracy. My favorite social networking site no longer exists in a form akin to its goal of being the virtual town square. I have not posted on the dead bird app since July 29, 2023.

We live in a hurting world on a hurting planet.

I hurt. Maybe you do, too. In recent months I’ve experienced both heightened physical and emotional pain and have written about the sources of my emotional anxiety: the fire in my former school; my little dog Snug’s health problems; my screwed up cataract surgery from 2022 that still impacts my vision; and feelings of displacement in one writing community.

Before now I have not shared publicly about the chronic physical pain I live with. This pain manifests itself in my hips, my lower back, and in the outside muscle of my left calf. I know the genesis of the pain: running a 10k in 2007. What was I thinking? I am not a runner and cannot fake it till I make it.

Until this past year, I managed the pain through exercise: yoga, spinning, light weight-lifting with hand weights and kettle bells. I also indulge in monthly massages. These self-care techniques no longer suffice in alleviating or reducing my physical pain. I shared this with my doctor in November. Now I am scheduled to have a bone scan January 17. The waiting is hard. I want to find relief now. I wanted my hurt to go away yesterday. But I must wait.

In contemplating my OLW for 2024, I cycled through several possibilities. I read Kim Johnson’s list of verbs–twice and made a list of possible words I could use to guide my year: do, resolve, nurture, quiet, notice, revere, wonder, begin, focus, heal all made the list.

What word embodies the best of these words? That’s the question that led me to choose care as my 2024 OLW. An article in The Washington Post Monday calls these words that push us toward living the life we envision for ourselves nudge words. Care is a word I expect to push me to live the life I want to live in the coming leap year.

As a stand-alone word, care embodies both a personal, community, and world focus. I am one given to strong opinions. I am someone unafraid of sharing my opinions. I want to be more careful, more caring, less careless, more of a carer in what I do and say as I move through 2024.

The best OLWs have both flexibility and specificity in meaning, I think. To care more, I’ll need to do, to focus, to nurture, to resolve, to begin, to wonder, and to work on my own healing. As one person, I cannot fix the hurt in the world, but I can show I care, and maybe that will begin stitching up some old and new wounds.