Word of the Year 2018

Brain cancer is...

...celebrating the New Year and its word.

Happy New Year!  Happy 2018 Wolf Super Moon...

...brought to you by Curt.

You probably know that, rather than choosing New Year's resolutions, we choose a Word of the Year.  (Click here to revisit our 2017 choice  or click here for 2016's word.)  

Our 2018 Word of the Year is....

...story.

Life in 2017 led us inexorably to our choice.  By living an "open" life we truly learned that every person we meet in our travels has a story.  And as an Optune ambassador, I was recently asked to write my (our) story.  Give that a try! 1200 words.  Go!  

We have lots to say on the subject, but here briefly is how "story" will guide us in 2018.

The Importance of Story

• Story is as old as the human experience.  Throughout history, the world's greatest teachers have taught through story.  Daniel Pink, in A Whole New Mind,  suggests that story is what binds us in today's digital, global society.
• Story is important across the professions.
• In education, using a constructivist epistemology, we hold that knowledge is not received; it is built.  Experience—stories of the meaning we have made—drives what we believe to be true about the world.  One of the best ways to teach, then, is to listen to the story and encourage the teller to hold that story up against other sources of truth to see what comes next.
• I recently learned about narrative medicine,  an approach to practice wherein the medical team attends to the patient's overall story and not just an isolated medical condition.
• Story has been an integral part of the Guillaume family experience.  
• When we took our little boys on what we deemed fondly our weekly "forced marches," we told stories to pass the miles.  Almost always Darrell's stories included the line, "And then the greeeeennn foogggg rolls in..."  
• We might skip brushing teeth when those boys were little, but we would never skip bedtime stories.  
• We still enjoy telling stories.  As we get older, though, Darrell and I preface our stories with, "If I've told you this story before, don't stop me."  
• So here's to stories past!
• And here's to stories future!  We watch our sons, grown men now, and feel wonder as we have the honor to watch their stories unfold with the women and work they love. 

The Importance of Other People's Stories

• We keep learning that, to truly understand other people's experiences, we need to stop and listen.  It's too easy to assume people's stories.
• We plan to ask.
• We plan to listen with the intent to understand.
• We plan to appreciate.

The Importance of Writing the Story

• We learn from each of our Words of the Year.  From Focus and from Open, we learned to pay attention to the setting, the characters, the conflicts, the story arcs of our lives.  And now we are counting on this year's word, Story, to help us be vigilant in paying attention to life:  Are we letting the days just pass, or are we writing the story?
• GBM has been a powerful teacher.  One of the first lessons it taught us is that the stories we write in our minds for the future are fiction.  They aren't real. They aren't our stories.
• Our story—the real story—is the one we write with the choices we make every day as we face life and its unexpected events.  We learned that the story is not what happens to us in life, but the meaning we choose to make of it. 

Here's to 2018, the Year of Stories!  Let's write some great ones together!