A mantra that I adopted a year ago or so is “tidy and toss.” I’ve mentioned it in here before — how I’m trying to tidy my house after the many years of raising my kids and accumulating things for them as well as other things that are now just taking up room and need to be tossed out, and how I’m trying to tidy myself by tossing out regrets and self-defeating thoughts and habits.
In doing this, instead of throwing out all the old magazines I never read in one fell swoop, I’m reading them one by one and then throwing each away. It’s actually quite interesting because I’m now reading things that were written and published well over a decade ago — I’m ashamed to admit that I kept them that long, but I’m also enjoying reading these older articles and seeing how they’ve held up and what’s still relevant in them.
Also, it’s cool to come upon things that interest me now and that I probably would have ignored if I’d managed to read these magazines when I first got them.
One of the things I came across was a full-page advertisement for a book called “One Word That Will Change Your Life.” It was published in 2013, and, yes, I was reading a magazine from 2013 when I saw it — I’ve since tossed it, though.
The concept of choosing one word intrigues me now, in 2024, in a way that it wouldn’t have in 2013 when I was newly divorced, still teaching full time, raising my daughter, and trying to get through the first year without my college-aged son at home. I was too busy just trying to keep all the balls in the air; there’s no way I could have stopped long enough to choose, let alone focus on, a single word.
I looked up the book on Amazon and saw that the concept really seems to go hand-in-hand with my “tidy and toss” mantra and with the way I’m attempting to live my life nowadays.
Essentially, you think long and hard about certain things to discover the one word that will be your guiding force for an entire year.
On its Amazon page, there is some information from the publisher, and this is part of that:
Prepare Your Heart: Look In
Take a little time to:
Unplug from the noise.
Ask a few essential questions.
Get away from the noise and distractions of life, and create an environment to look inward, quiet your mind, and really listen to your heart. Then ask yourself these three questions:
What do I need?
What's in my way?
What needs to go?
On the surface, I need a clutter-free house, the “stuff” is in my way, and most of it needs to go. The magazines are the easy stuff to get rid of; the stuff that has memories of my kids attached to it, not so easy to toss — that’s why I’m still working on it years after my youngest moved out, but I’ll get there. It’s a process, like most things that matter are.
If I look at my “tidy and toss” mantra, I could choose the word MINIMIZE for my one word. This word would also help in the other areas in which I’d like to minimize myself — my physical weight and the psychological weight I still carry inside me from things that need to go (a.k.a. my regrets).
If I look at a larger picture, though, what I need is to be read and another thing I need to do is to read all the books I already own, so my one word could also be READ. The word “read” can be pronounced like “reed” as in the action that I need to do with the books I own and as “red” as in what I want to be as an author. What’s in my way? and What needs to go? are harder to answer here, though. I suppose that the answer to both those questions is simply everything and anything that takes me away from the book I’m trying to write and the ones I’m trying to read.
Prior to 2013, my words would have been something like FREEDOM, PEACE, JOY because those were all things I desperately needed, but my ex and my stressful and unfulfilling career were in my way and the things that needed to go. I now have those things in spades, and I work hard to preserve them, but they aren’t words I’d choose as my one word anymore.
In a different magazine from many years ago, I came upon an article about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, the author of “The Yearling.” The writer lamented how that novel has become lost in obscurity and relegated to YA literature even though it won a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the Pulitzer isn’t awarded to YA books. I was surprised to learn that Rawlings became a severe alcoholic later in life, and her cause of death was a result of this. If I hadn’t visited Florida last April for the very first time ever and stayed near Ocala, I wouldn’t have heard that there are people who still live deep within the forest near there, like Jody and his family in “The Yearling” did. When I read this article, I was reminded of that and felt a need to reread “The Yearling” with the eyes of someone who has now been to that part of the world. I did throw out the magazine when I was done reading it, but I tore out that article and tucked it into my copy of “The Yearling” as a future reminder of those things when I reread the book someday.
Parts of Florida factor into my next novel. This past week, I’ve accomplished a lot more on it and have begun the lengthy reworking of it, making notes about things I need to change and rewriting sections. I haven’t yet written the ending of the book, but I know how it will end, so now it’s a matter of fixing earlier parts of the story to fit the ending I have in mind.
In doing all this, I’m often searching for the right words so that the story will be the best I can make it. Sometimes, I will sit in silence for minutes on end, quieting my inner self and letting the perfect word come to me.
Words are important, and whether it’s choosing the right one to use as a guiding force in my life or choosing the right ones to compile a 90,000 word novel, they have the power to do incredible things. If more people thought about the words they used before they used them, our world would be a better place.
Here are the words I’d like to see used more in the coming year:
For the world: PEACE
For our country: UNITY
For my state: GROWTH
What would your one word be? If you care to share, leave a comment.
Until next time. If you’re a paying subscriber, read on for another excerpt of my work in progress. I’m hopeful that the full draft will be complete by or before mid-November and ready for my first readers in December. If you’d like to become one of those readers who will give me feedback, let me know via email. You can reach my email via the contact page of my website: Tammy's website
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Tammy Marshall
Read on for another portion of my next novel, “Last in the Class.”
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