Today, on the last day of 2015, I want to sum up my journey this year with my One Little Word, grace.

When I chose this word I had an image of myself, welcoming friends into our home, sharing our life and space with them, and treating them with love, kindness and respect. It took me a while to figure out the word that described that image but I finally caught it: grace. It perfectly described how I wanted to treat people, how I wanted to handle situations (the happy and stressful ones), and how I wanted to move through my days.

Like everything in life, there were times when I felt like I nailed it and times when I felt like I completely missed the mark. But you know what? Nailing it every time isn’t the point. The point is to keep trying. To learn from our mistakes and do better when we know better.

Throughout the year I found lots of quotes about grace that really illuminated my feelings about this word. Quotes like:

“There are some of your graces which would never be discovered if it weren’t for your trials.” C.H. Spurgeon

“She believed the cracks were openings for grace.” Studio Lila

“Grace isn’t a little prayer you say before a meal, it’s a way to live.”

“Be pretty if you can, be witty if you must, but be gracious if it kills you.” Elise de Wolfe

My words don’t really leave me. Joy, my word from 2014, is still very much a part of my focus and I know grace will be as well. But for today, it’s time to remember this quote because it is absolutely perfect for my last day of focusing on this word:

“Let today be the day you learn the grace of letting go and the power of moving on.” Steve Maraboli

Come back tomorrow and I’ll tell you my word for 2016.

 

On this, the first day of the new year, I am ready to share with you my One Little Word for 2015. Of course I’m doing it with a photo.

It’s a bracelet from Keep Collective and it spells out my word, grace, with a crescent moon for the letter C. It’s funky and stylish and will serve as an awesome reminder of the way I want to live my life this year – with grace.

Grace at work and at home.

Grace in my relationships and in the way I talk to the people I love.

Grace while volunteering and serving the community.

Grace when welcoming and entertaining friends and family.

Grace in my actions and my words and my spirit.

I can’t wait to see how this word moves through my world in 2015.

Happy New Year, my friends!

First, a little housekeeping.

You may have noticed that the 2 posts I had up last week are gone. Sorry about that but apparently I got hacked and in the process of trying to clean things up those posts vanished into the ether. I have since decided that removing malware is beyond my skill set and I’m going to pay my host company to do it for me. I tell you all of this not so that you will feel sorry for me but so that you will know – just in case the blog should become unavailable at some point this week – that all is well other than some technical crap.

And I still have a bunch of pictures to process from our visit to Kim’s but in the meantime I want to catch you up on my One Little Word 2014 progress. When I first signed up for this I was definitely not going to follow the prompts and scrapbook much of anything. I figured I would just use the prompts to focus but not actually, you know, do anything with them. But then I watched the videos and I decided that it might be fun to start an album for this whole thing and before I knew it I fell down that rabbit hole and I was buying an album and page protectors and cutting up paper and and and.

I’m pleased with it, though, and I’m looking forward to using this process to stay focused on my word.

It’s JOY! in case you forgot and I found it in unexpected places again this past week.

Once at Kim’s. I would have put those wooden letters right in my suitcase if I thought I could have gotten away with it.

And once while reading a magazine.

How ’bout that. JOY! really is everywhere.

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.