Happy New Year of 2025!
It’s that time of year again, when I invite you to join me in a word (or a phrase) that can guide your year. The newness of January invites us to try something new, something healthy for improving our lives and increasing our positive footprint in a challenging world.
You can read my past blogs about developing a word of the year for 2022, 2023 and 2024. Using such a word instead of a New Year’s resolution is becoming more broadly popular. A Washington Post article notes “A nudge word can help you set a vision for 2025. Here’s how to choose one.”
While some including that article's author suggest words that fall under broader categories like strength, growth, hope, calm, and joy, I’ve tended to use those broader categories for my annual words: surrender, listen, breathe, create, manifest, grace, mercy, hope, Emmanuel, and peace. Then, I allow the words to accumulate and gather steam within me, continuing to work with it as I take on a different focus for the next year. Over time, all these words become a joint focus that lights my way.
Last year was a bit tough for me, I must admit. Peace is a difficult concept to practice internally and externally. Peace can be, among other things, a value I bring to the world in my interactions with others. It can be something I need in my own soul. And peace can be, or rather is, a value that the world badly needs. Yet we do such a poor job with it—as any comments section on social media demonstrates.
Honestly, I barely succeeded in reminding myself of my own need for peace last year - primarily because I had multiple major medical events requiring life-saving surgery and more minor medical concerns beyond those. I felt stripped of peace while praying for it constantly. At best, I intentionally tried to bring peace to others in whatever small ways were mine to offer.
As I looked more and more for signs of peace globally, I was horrified by how different countries, including my own -the U.S. defined it, how they often forgot about seeking it in the names of strength, autonomy, and independence. Undoubtedly, peace is a value I’ll be working on my entire life, and I hope that one by one we can make a difference.
This year is the first time I have struggled to determine my year’s word because, I think, of last year’s challenges with peace in all its potentialities. There’s a part of me that wants to focus on and wrestle with joy as my word. Joy is an emotion and value that I very much desire for myself, and I know I need to become more joyful before I can spread joy to others.
Yet, my more patient side senses that I must accept myself more fully if I’m ever to reach a genuine and lifegiving sense of joy. This work requires entering purposely into vulnerability. For example, last year’s surgical interventions and their toll taught me that I need to acknowledge and not fight myself as aging (yes, I’m 67) and as possessing an imperfect body and mind. Otherwise, I fear I won’t find myself as a joy-filled elder who can serve God and others well.
So, reluctantly but necessarily, in 2025, the word I’m going for is the Japanese concept of wabi sabi. In brief, wabi sabi means to acknowledge the Buddhist understanding of life’s impermanence, suffering, and emptiness—not to be a grumpy old gal but to honor the beauty of the imperfect. Recognizing and practicing wabi sabi can lead to enjoying simplicity and the splendor of brokenness, a practice of self- and other acceptance.

I’ve begun that work with my kintsugi pottery art practice. It’s been a good beginning because the art of gold joinery for broken pottery has many intersections with grief and intentional healing. I look for imperfections in objects now to see whether I can fix them with kintsugi or whether I can just see them as lovely in their brokenness. Looking at natural settings like the beach and the forest helps me with that practice. While I still tend to seek more perfect seashells, I do enjoy the gorgeous texture of trees with their natural imperfections and broken bodies.
Now I need to center myself within that work—acknowledging and becoming happy that my body and mind are imperfect and aging, seeing them as naturally progressing through life and experiencing gratitude for all that I’ve been, done, and seen. While I continue to fill my spirit by intentionally honoring and mourning losses with wabi sabi (using the concepts of peace, Emmanuel, grace, and so on), I want to access the beauty of imperfection and aging within myself. That’s my hope for this year’s work of wabi sabi. I’ll let you know how that’s going next year.
What’s your word going to be this year? Most likely, it will suggest itself to you. You can share it or tuck it away in a personal part of you. If you really work that word, however, it will begin to shine for others to see because it will become an indelible and permanent part of you.
Best wishes and a hug!
Comments