It’s May and I still haven’t talked about my word of the year, which is “peace.”
My word of the year practice has progressed, each word I choose building on the next with meaning and intent. In 2016, I chose “trust,” and it completely changed the way I viewed this type of “word of the year” practice. So much so, I created a word of the year painting class especially designed to help you create projects that focused on your word.
Last year, I chose “embrace” as a way to build on the word “trust” from the year before. To me, when you continue to trust you embrace whatever it is God puts in front of you.
This year, I kept thinking about how I wanted my life to be, which is key is picking a word that will essentially become your mantra for the next year. I thought about the relationships I had, the things I wanted to improve on, the way I wanted to live, and finally realized the word peace kept coming up over and over again. 
I’m again building on the strength of what deeper trust and embracing God’s blessings has created in me. Life is always about improvement, moving forward. So this year I wanted to acknowledge that with the word “peace.”
When I sat down to write this post, I found this quote from Mister Rogers:
“Peace means far more than the opposite of war.”
And you know how much I love Mister Rogers and to top it off, I bought some of his stamps yesterday.
It is my hope that peace happens everywhere it can in my life, with relationships, with my career, with my finances, health, marriage, and yes, even our world. I want peace, to the extent that I can have it, with people, but I also want peace in my own life. There are people who think the whole of the relationship is about what they want and need. You find yourself morphing yourself over and over to fit what they can handle, and eventually you don’t recognize yourself anymore. That’s not peace.
I can have peace with people who have quirks but who show they care. They show they care by thinking of you, not when you continually hound them to or remind them but because they are putting themselves in your position. When you bring up a concern they listen. And they NEVER give you a non-apology (“I’m sorry you feel that way.”)
Sometimes the only way to have peace with people is to keep them in your heart but not your life. It is a hard decision, but you know when it is time to make it. Relationships are work, good work, not something that is not a chore but something that helps you grow and understand people. You can expand your relationship IQ and deal with what people want and need, but it can’t just be you doing that. Relationships exist in the space between what both people are working on. It’s about coming together and meeting in the emotional place that is not you and not them but “the friendship.”
I feel like peace is being reinforced in different ways over and over, which is something that happens when you choose a word of the year. I want more peace, simply that.
Are you doing a Word of the Year practice? Doing art projects centered on your word in some way can help you incorporate the meaning of this word more fully into your life. Consider taking my ecourse, Word of the Year Mixed Media Painting.
