i've never been about new year’s resolutions.

i get verbose, they get clunky, and i forget them.

they're sort of disparate thoughts—a litany of lists—that don't quite hang together cohesively. and so, a few years ago, i picked up the practice of selecting a single word to help guide my year.

ours is a pick-me culture.

we strive to be picked at every turn—at all the stops along this thing called life.

pick-me for your soccer team. your baseball team. your volleyball team. pick-me for your academic institution. pick-me to be your girlfriend, boyfriend, lover, tuesday night date—to be a part of some situationship. just pick-me.

everywhere we go, in every way, we strive to be chosen.

the use of questions. or, rather, the use of a beautiful question, redirects us from a place of having to have an answer to an exploratory one. beautiful questions invite us to connect to self in a deeper way.

a question requires the mind to stay open. to ruminate. to continue to consider. to even wonder. and in that space, that tiny opening, between wondering and knowing is an incubator for new signals—ones from our hearts and guts. pings of passion. pings of deep intuition.

the only way that i've been able to rise above the choking weight of these systems is to build a resilience so immune to pain that it takes quite a significant amount of duress for me to feel it. a protection mechanism.