Earlier this month, during a challenging moment I forgot that my word for 2025 is levity. It may have helped my stress hormones if I had remembered to see the situation with more of a sense of humor.

First a quick note and a little background: I picked levity as my 2025 word of the year because I was feeling a foreboding heaviness and finding it much more difficult to be optimistic about the future as we approached the coming year. More levity felt like an excellent antidote to this heavy feeling.  It has been my natural inclination to take things a bit too seriously. As a kid I was gifted an autograph stuffy called Worry Wart cause I was known to worry way too much. I can seriously identify with the beloved Winnie the Pooh character, Eeyore.  This inclination while still present today at 70 years young, it has been modestly tempered with a little less worry and bit more optimism most days.  My friend Gratitude has helped a lot with that. I’d like to keep it that way if for no other reason than people with a sense of humor and willingness to laugh at life’s absurdities tend to live longer.

My challenging moment was actually a rather silly first world annoyance. Certainly not worth my getting all steamed up about.  I was done shopping way before the other two who were “having way too much fun taking their time to see every item on every shelf.”  I was tired, hungry, my back was complaining, and the store had no place to sit and wait.  And wait. And wait.

In that grumpy moment, I didn’t remember my word of the year. I didn’t remember to consciously invite Levity to come help. If I had, I’m sure it would have played out differently.

Now that I think about it and I’m a bit more rested, fed, and my back is quieter I realized I was likely just earning my karma for making my husband similarly wait and wait and wait while I grocery shopped.  Ha! Ha!  Im sure I will have many more opportunities to practice infusing some levity into these kinds of challenging moments.  Next time Jan!

In the meantime, I believe I will be creating/identifying a muse named Levity who can help me more easily remember during those grumpier moments to find my funny bone, look for the lightness, and see the possibilities.  So stay tuned. Perhaps we will introduce her in our next post.