Last week, after I committed to doing One Little Word, I decided to do a search on Etsy and see if I could find anything that could serve as a daily reminder of my word. A piece of jewelry, a sign for my office or house, you know. Within seconds I found the perfect thing.

It’s a sweet little ring and it fits perfectly on the middle finger of my right hand. And it was $7. I mean, really, how could I not get it?

But here’s the thing I’ve started to notice about One Little Word. Once you choose your word, you start to see it everywhere.

In magazines.  On signs. On Dunkin Donuts cups (I meant to take a picture of that on Tuesday and I forgot. Wouldn’t you know that my cup on Wednesday was the regular one!) and more.

Turns out, I’m seeing JOY! everywhere I look these days.

I’ve been thinking a bit about this whole one little word thing. Truthfully, I thought about it way back when Mary first started blogging about it. And I thought about it some more when Kym starting blogging about it. And then, in the last week or so, lots of my Facebook newsfeed was taken up by friends announcing what their word for 2014 was going to be. So, lemming that I am, I thought about it some more.

There were several words I that considered and eventually discarded for various reasons. And yesterday I decided I wasn’t going to do it. I decided that one word for a whole year was ridiculous. A year should include millions of words that are about millions of things. After I made that decision I started writing this blog post in my head.

Shut up. If you are a blogger then you write blog posts in your head.

Anyway.

I had this whole post going in my head about how I wasn’t jumping on this bandwagon and it was too trendy and I was just going to live my life in 2014 and go with the flow.

And then I saw a sign right up the street from my office.

And that sign said JOY!

And I realized, that’s my word for 2014.

JOY!

In all caps and with an exclamation point.