“Ooh, ooh, child, things are gonna get easier. Ooh child, things will get brighter. Someday, yea, we’ll put it together and we’ll get it all undone, some day when the world is much brighter.”
--The Five Stairsteps, 1970
Crucial.
When I was a new writer and penning stories for a now long forgotten employee newspaper at a Massachusetts high tech company, I got into a bad rhetorical habit. To emphasize what I thought were the most important and pressings aspects of a story, I’d use the word “crucial” to make my point. “Crucial”—as in “decisive or critical, in the success or failure of something” and “of great importance.”
“Crucial” is a great descriptor to bring home the gravity or immediacy of a given situation. The problem was that in one particular story I used the word “crucial” something like five or six times, and all within a 500 word article. My editor read my first draft and then stated the obvious: “You know, John, if use the word ‘crucial’ so many times in a story, it kind of loses its meaning. Everything can’t be crucial, right?”
To avoid a repeat of that linguistic faux pas, I’m trying my best to tamp down my temptation to go overboard in my word choice for this story. Using words multiple times, like “crisis” or “emergency” or “urgency” or “unprecedented.” For you see if I begin to use any of those terms to describe the intensity of what our nation has gone through in just the past two and a half weeks, never mind the past year, I might go overboard. Label everything as in “once in a hundred years!” or “never before in our history!”
I’ll confess as a writer this: I feel like I’ve run out of words to describe the journey America has been on the past 365 days, beginning January 21st, 2020, when the first confirmed case of the corona virus appeared in Washington state. Since then? Some mighty crucial things have happened.
Crucial.
As in the first attempted violent overthrow of an election and the democratic process in America’s history. As in the second worst pandemic and health crisis in our republic’s many years of existence. As in demonstrations for racial justice in the wake of the killing of so many people of color. As in the collapse of the economy and record numbers of people going jobless and hungry. As in the mental and spiritual health struggles so many of us are going through, isolated from our families, our friends, our past times, like sports and the arts.
As in just trying to remember back to a time when things were “normal”.
I’ve exhausted the English language. I tried to use the thesaurus function in my word processing software to write this essay, but it finally just broke down, after so much overuse. I know many of you feel this way too: how can anyone put into adequate words that which was and still is 2020-21? I’m liking “dumpster fire”, a phrase that’s been used by many.
And then there’s the anxiety about what next “crucial” event is lurking around the corner.
A volcano popping up in the backyard? Or plagues perhaps, hordes of frogs falling from the sky? How about Tom Brady, marching towards another Super Bowl, but doing so in a uniform that is not the red, white and blue of our New England Patriots? Okay, that last one is actually true, but it still feels kind of apocalyptic.
So, I’m now going to attempt to use only good words to look ahead, as we move into the next chapter in our shared lives. I’m thinking “hope” might be a great place to start. “Hope”, as in “an optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation of positive outcomes.” Thanks Wikipedia. “Hope” as in, “Hope is the thing with feathers, That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops - at all.” Thanks Emily Dickinson. Hope, as in, “Surely there is a future, and your hope will not be cut off.” Thanks Book of Proverbs.
For in the end, “hope” is a word and a feeling and a commitment that has the power to lean into and overcome anything the world throws our way. “Hope” is actually the most courageous thing we can do right now, an act of defiance, a commitment that each of us has the power to embrace and embody right now. “Hope” doesn’t deny the bad but instead hope looks at the bad and declares, “We’ve been through the worst, but, by God, I dare to believe that the best is yet to come.”
Yup. Hope. Unlike “crucial” hope is a word that we can never use too often or too many times. Hope always looks to tomorrow and trusts in better days ahead. I need to hope. I must have hope. It is hope that will save us all.
And “crucial”? I used it twelve times in this essay. I think I’ll give that word a rest for now.
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