Just One Little Word Says it All...

Recently I read this book for book club:

I didn't Love it.  But I already wrote a post about that, and it wasn't well received, and I'm not in the mood to rehash ground I've already walked.  Let's just say this isn't a review, and we all get to think what we want about the book.

What I did love was the delightful way the author used the English language to pull you inside her world.  I loved reading about Naples, Italy through her eyes, and as she meditated in the Ashram in India I felt like I was inside her soul, watching as it coalesced into something beautiful.  She definitely has a way with language.

I found it truly interesting when she began to talk with her new friends in Italy about how one word could describe a person or a place.  Every city has one word which describes both the energy and the people who live there, they declared.  Every person has one word which embodies who they are. Hmmm...

The book was the source of one of the most interesting discussions we have ever had at Book Club, I love it when you can sit with good people and talk about ideas for hours and leave feeling inspired and better than when the discussion began.  Whenever book club is finished and I go home it takes a while for my energy to wind down, for all that thought and processing in my brain to slow enough for sleep to arrive and dreams to survive.

One of the members of our book club has a blog-a fabulous blog you should all visit (assuming you didn't arrive here from there) and on that blog she challenged everyone to find their word.  That got me thinking more specifically about mine.

This was hard for me, no one word fit me all the time.  Sometimes I say whatever comes to mind, and don't give a hang about the consequences, other times I am cautious and choose my words like precious gems.  Sometimes I am patient, sometimes....well, let's just say I'm not.  Sometimes I am confident and self assured, and then there are those times I'm clinging to the closest stable object just to keep me from falling to my knees in a wave of self doubt.  

Social and by turns very Private.  Talkative and Shy.  Independent and Dependent.  Steady as a rock and shaky as a baby learning to walk.  How to describe all of that in one word?  And it finally came to me just this morning...Variable.  That's my word.  

Variable means always changing, adaptable, and willing to do and be and try new things.  It can also mean being inconsistent, which may or may not be one of my biggest issues as a parent, ahem...  I've always been the kind of person who is friends with lots of different types of people-never just stuck with one "crowd."  I've always like all kinds of music, books and movies, never sticking to any one genre.  I'm variable, and I like it. 

But mostly I like that it means I'm always changing, improving, and looking for ways to become the best version of myself I can be.  I also like that a variable is part of an experiment or equation that determines the outcome.  

In this grand experiment of mortal life I'm the variable.  Who will I be?  How will I react?  What will I seek?  

And in smaller equations too-like what happens in my family.  That's largely determined by me-the mother.  Julie B. Beck said that what the mother values, the family values.  That's a big responsibility-and I'm the biggest variable.   Our children often take their cues on how to respond and what choices to make my watching us-their mothers.

So, I'm the variable, and I am variable.  A noun and an adjective.  That seems apt.