The Year of _____.

Earlier today, I stopped in a cell phone store to buy a screen protector. Mine had fallen off the day before, while in the airport, and caught onto the bottom of my sister’s shoe. The cashier helped me find one that matched my phone and then led me to the register. That’s when she told me that she’d been researching car insurance quotes in her downtime. She asked if I had any advice. I didn’t, except for a few comparison search engines. She was 19 and this would be her first automobile purchase, and she was going to take the time she needed to make the right decision. I wished her luck, put the screen protector in my bag, and headed out the door.

I always feel a pang of jealously at people who are motivated or forced to wedge their way into  difficult decisions, like investments or retirement plans or in this young woman’s case, car insurance. These decisions make me nervous and I do my best to avoid them.

Which brings me to what everyone is almost done thinking about: New Year’s Resolutions. I have a friend who chooses a word rather than a resolution. For example, 2012 was the year of joy; the year that she allowed multiple men to buy her dinner and basked in excitement of new relationships. She pegged 2013 as the year of change and proceeded her quit a job, apply to grad school, walk the Camino and move to Boston. And so on.

We talked about her “years of” a few days before the 2013 ended, while sitting at a hotel bar after another friend’s wedding reception. Then we contemplated my possible words. Discipline? Patience? Trust?  She shook her head. It must be a word that can seep into every aspect of your life.  I told her I would keep thinking.

It wasn’t until a half hour after the clock struck midnight on January 1, 2014 that the word came to me, while bidding another friend—a few PBRs deep—farewell. “It’s the year of empowerment!” She yelled. Yes! That’s it! I yelled back. The year of empowerment. A year of experiments, running, painting, making mistakes, writing and telling people how you really feel. A year of less thinking and more doing. 

So we’ll see how it goes. The thing about the New Year is that after a week or so it becomes old again, and you realize you are still yourself, facing the same fears, living within the same patterns and eating the same breakfast as the year before. All you can do is take queues from those around you, like the girl working in a quiet storefront on rainy Saturday afternoon, and let them push you to into the places that you can no longer avoid.