Ask.
Ask and ye shall receive.
Ask a silly question and you’ll get a silly answer.
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
And the phrase that really cemented my choice of this word as my 2025 Word:
If you don’t ask, the answer is always no.
This phrase is attributed to writer Nora Roberts, and the full quote is actually:
“If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.”
I have no idea in what context she used this phrase. She’s a romance novelist, and I haven’t read any of her work. I’ve heard the phrase from other people, and it means a lot to me.
There was a time when I didn’t ask for things. My mom told me, “Oh, don’t ask, they’ll just say no,” and the implication was that the person would think less of me. That I was presumptuous, entitled, too big for my britches. And so I didn’t. I didn’t ask for favors, opinions, people’s time, because I didn’t want to be perceived badly.
The hell with that.
In the last year or so, I’ve asked for a few things and gotten them. Most recently, for paid parking for a gig (which would have otherwise eaten up 1/3 of the fee that I was getting). And for a collaboration between MDDC NATS and a major performing organization (which I can’t talk about yet and is still in the works). I’ve heard no a couple of times, or not yet.
Last year I didn’t have a word of the year. I didn’t do a brain dump to kick off my year. Or at any time during the year. I feel as though I got things done, but it was an accident. I certainly didn’t have any kind of focus, which was my word of the year in 2022. Maybe I lost my mojo after the events in July-August 2022, when I lost a student I didn’t expect to lose, had Covid, tore my flexor tendon, and had surgery for that and cataract surgery on both eyes. (That was a really bad summer.)
So I started off this year with the intent to be more organized and to take more chances. I thought of my word of the year being Discovery, but that seemed so ephemeral. And then I wasn’t even thinking – I was just asking someone for something, and it came to me.
Just ask.