My 2021 Word of the Year
Last year, I made it a point to seek out joy. 2019 was a hard year for me, and 2020 was meant to be a return to the light. When I chose “joy” as my word of the year, I envisioned it as a celebration of my new life in Los Angeles, a chance to actively embrace a city I never wanted to live in, but found myself choosing anyway.
As we all know, it didn’t turn out that way. L.A. went into COVID lockdown on March 19 and never fully emerged. In many ways, the city I moved to at the end of 2019 doesn’t even exist anymore. I never got the opportunity to embrace it. What’s left when we come out of this will have a new solemnity. It will surely be a little less colorful and a lot more cautious, but joy won’t have disappeared. Even in the darkest parts of 2020, there was joy to be found.
2020 joy came in the smallest of packages—a hummingbird hovering over the compost bin, the first raindrops after the summer drought, a loaf of fresh-baked bread. It was a year of beautiful moments set against the dark backdrop of catastrophe. Despite the unexpected twist, I’m incredibly grateful I decided to focus on joy, because if I hadn’t, I might have missed how much we still had to celebrate.
Every day last year, I learned the truth behind the idea that where we choose to place our focus impacts our outlook on life. Was I joyful every single moment? Of course not, but just choosing, over and over again, to look for the joy turned what could have been a miserable year into a nuanced one.
An oft-cited 2003 study by Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough divided participants into three groups. Over a course of weeks, one group was told to list things they felt grateful for, a second instructed to list hassles or annoyances, and the third asked to list significant events from the week (whether positive or negative.) All the participants were also presented with a questionnaire about their overall well-being, including both physical and mental metrics. The subjects in the gratitude group scored higher on multiple aspects of well-being, but especially on sleep quality (and we know how important that is), optimism and connection with others. In comparison with the “hassles” group, they also scored better on physical measures like general health and time spent exercising.
I’m all-in for research-backed interventions to improve happiness. Moving forward from the specter of 2020 with all its losses and disappointments, seems the perfect time to focus on the good in life, recognize my many privileges, and extend what good fortune I have to help others.
My word of the year for 2021 is…
gratitude.
To follow along with my gratitude journey in 2021 and learn how I plan to integrate the idea into my life, please support me on Patreon. Tiers start at $3/month and include regular updates, as well as access to my archive of patron-only posts.
