As someone who attaches a great deal of importance to words, it might surprise you that sometimes I find the things that mean most to me of all are things that I find hard to express with words. Too many words can feel cheap, languorous, lacking the sharpness of my deepest emotions.

Maybe that’s why for the past few years I’ve tried to take each January and make a single focus word for the year ahead. I’m pretty sure the word I chose for 2023 was LESS, but maybe I embraced that idea so much that I didn’t write about it at all, though I did write a poem about the futility of unrealistic resolutions.

Anyway - I do have a new word for 2024 and that word is FINE. I’ll share more about why below.

And hey, if you’re interested - here are some “words of the year” as chosen by linguists and dictionary organizations. Two from 2023 were “rizz” and “authentic.”

I guess if I’m going to choose FINE as my word of 2024, I couldn’t choose a better theme song than this one, by the Indigo Girls

Why FINE?

I’m glad you asked!

The great thing about the word “fine” is that it’s a deceptively simple one, with a layer of different meanings. There’s a richness to “fine” that’s easy to miss when it’s sometimes our default response to a question about our own wellbeing. I think 2024 can hold within it all these different meanings of FINE, or at least I’m going to try to remember that throughout my own year.

FINE 1: The goodness of “OK”

While the COVID pandemic raged in 2020 and we all found ourselves buying weird loungewear on Amazon, I too bought myself a sweatshirt with an ironic saying (they are my favorite). This sweatshirt read:

It’s fine, I’m fine, everything is fine.

I guess that kind of sentiment is the initial thought I had when choosing FINE for my word of 2024. But rather than an acquiescence to the status quo, or worse, a covering up of authentic emotions, the kind of “fine” I wanted to get at here is that “fine” is actually all around me and I’m often the one turning its beauty into something pedantic and unsatisfying.

The truth is that the actual meaning of the word “fine” really does denote pleasure and beauty and quality of life. Something fine is something unique and special and individual. So part of what I want to say when I say FINE in 2024 is to recognize the absolute everyday beauty of my own life, my own individual self, and all those around me.

One of the traps of January is the way that marketing and capitalism turn each of us into works-in-progress. Sure, you’re lovable and capable … if you’re working out and eating well and journaling and waking up early and making all your meals from scratch and dry brushing and saving for retirement and paying off all your debts and, oh I don’t know, fill in whatever other virtues that you feel responsible to each morning when you wake up.

I forgot flossing.

Don’t get me wrong, routines and responsibility are the building blocks of adult life. But they don’t make you valuable or lovable or who you are. That’s why I like fine.

You’re already fine. I’m already fine. It’s fine. Life. Is. Fine.

If we learned anything in 2023 and into the first month of 2024, it’s that calamity and war and violence and disaster absolutely will come. We don’t have to hasten them. Still too many of us are making catastrophes out of ordinary challenges, and hating ourselves for not living into some externally or internally imposed impossible standard, which really only makes money for someone else by convincing us to buy the things that will ultimately make us FINE when we are already FINE.

Have I convinced you yet?

FINE 2: embracing the rarity and fragility of beauty

Some of the other meanings of the word “fine,” particularly as an adjective, denote high quality, uniqueness, and sensitivity. Maybe this meaning seems the opposite of the typical bland retort: “I’m fine.”

But that’s also why I love this word so much for 2024. To know in this year what it is to be FINE, to be OK and alive not as a work-in-progress but right exactly as you are, means that you’re set free to see and experience the fullness of rare, fragile beauty in your midst.

As I think about this meaning for 2024, I’m reminded of something I heard on one of my favorite podcasts, Under the Influence, by author Jo Piazza.

On Dec. 28, Jo’s guest, Kathryn Jezer-Morton is talking about the recent popularity of “trad wives” on Instagram, and this new sort of reactionary trend that suggests mothers need to spend their days in carefully manicured bliss, always looking well-groomed, with affable, attractive children - and certainly no career outside the home.

In the midst of their discussion, Jezer-Morton says this really profound thing that is part of my focus for 2024. I’m paraphrasing here, but she basically says this:

So many beautiful things aren’t pretty.

At that point I had to pause the podcast and just reflect for a moment on my own life, and lives of my loved ones. I thought about the beauty of hard-won young love, and the dirtiness of growing up together into fully formed adults, embracing the changes of aging and maturity and parenthood. I thought about newborns, and dark circles, and poop literally everywhere. About an overgrown backyard full of wild creatures and weeds that needed to be pulled. About speaking the truth in love and hearing it with an open heart. About a community that comes together to support someone who’s struggling. About cheap, watery coffee in church basements and the smell of stale cigarettes. About wiping dirt off your son’s skinned knees and tears out of his trusting eyes, knowing that even as he has fallen, you’ll help him get back up.

When I say FINE in 2024 I also want to get at this idea, that maybe I’ll only really experience the beauty if I let go of the need for everything and everyone to be pretty.

FINE 3: the end

The last thing I thought about when I thought about using FINE as my word for 2024 was the Italian meaning of FINE, in a piece of music, pronounced fee-nay.

FINE means “end” in Italian, and you’ll often see it in a piece of music that repeats, including many religious hymns, which will instruct musicians and singers to D.C. al fine, which means repeat back from the beginning until you reach the “fine” or ending.

The repeat symbol in music can sometimes be a dreaded one. It can throw you off, make you lose your place, or get confused as to where you’re going. I guess that can be a familiar feeling in life, too.

So FINE can also be a signpost not to miss, a guide on the way when the road seems uncertain or confusing.

And FINE also means that sometimes it’s just time for something to end. FINE or “ending” is OK. It can even be beautiful or, reminiscent of our second definition, fine. I know without a doubt that 2024 will have within it many FINES, or endings. Hopefully those won’t include American democracy. (Seriously). But on a smaller scale, within the endings of 2024 will be challenges in our lives and in the world in general to begin anew, with energy and hope for a better future. Part of embracing this meaning of FINE is letting go of what didn’t go well before something came to an end.

If you’re like me, and you can sometimes be seduced by the allure of nostalgia, you can find yourself thinking that everything that has passed away is an occasion for despair - that that moment is gone, and the joy you felt in it will never come again. That’s true, of course. But if we extend that way of thinking, each moment is a lost cause, once passed. You can never catch up. There is only the eternal now.

FINE’s, or endings, are OK. They have to happen for life to go on. There is no perfect FINE, no absolute right time for one thing to end and another to begin. There is only FINE in the moment, an acceptance of the beauty amidst the pain and the struggle, a knowledge that nothing is forever in this world, and that each moment is worth experiencing in its own unique fullness.

So that’s it for my word for 2024. What’s yours?

My hope is that as I embrace all three meanings of FINE in 2024, I’ll be energized and enlivened to tackle the challenges for truth and justice and love in this world and in my own little life. I’m sending you all those same wishes for energy and restoration and love in your life, so that we can be here for one another in the year ahead.

Shared with permission from Rev. Angela Denker’s Substack, “I’m Listening”