I could spend my life writing variations this post—what is the plan for today or this week? What’s this month’s theme? (Advent, duh!) What am I focussing on this quarter?

And, then, the mother load, the $64,000 question, The One Question to Rule Them All:

What’s 2022 all about? What is my word of the year?

2020 gave us terrible clarity—the cosmic pun (20/20) on vision, equality, expectation. Everyone retreated and reassessed. We rode our bicycles across the tightrope while juggling all the things. My word was Balance.

In 2021, whatever may have been in “balance” coming out of 2020 got toppled—no school, new school; no job, new job; no plan, new plan. My word is Fulfilled.

I chose it because I wanted to be happy and bring happiness to others through significant and purposeful living. I wanted to do what I was meant to do and get what I wanted from life because of it. Perhaps Fulfilled was the word of 2021 for a lot of people. This year saw the world’s various communities—human and microbial—take significant risks to create a world that they wanted to live in—a world of insurrections, resignations, and variations.

The last couple of years showed us what could be—the extremists wanted to create a fantasy world for themselves and the workers no longer wanted to support the fantasy world of the wealthy. Even Covid had a vision for a new and better place free of effective vaccines and roving antibodies.

I just wanted to feel right in the choices I had made and was making this year. I wanted to feel satisfied by whatever came to me in 2021. It was a big ask.

For 2022, I am scaling back, reeling it in, staying local. I’m going to turn my awesome manifesting powers down a notch (perhaps to 10 from 11) and select a smaller word. An incremental word. A word that I don’t have to capitalize. A word that applies to only me. Something quaint like liberation, a state of being free to do what I want to do.

Yeah, something simple like that.