The Word of the Day

[Jesus watching me spin out.]

For some of you the word of the day is “Social Justice Warrioring.” For others it is probably “Hurricane.” For dictionary.com it is “Atweel,” which is Scot for “surely”—not Shirley, but surely. For me it is “Perseverate.”

If modernity has given me anything it should be the freedom to pick my own word of the day, and not be bound by the strange choices of other people, or even the weather.

So maybe you don’t know what Perseverate means. Let me help you. It is a verb used without an object, and is relatively new, only first recorded in 1910, and it means, “to repeat something insistently or redundantly.” The example provided by my app is, “to Perseverate in reminding children of their responsibilities.” Many other examples employed the word “on.” She Perseverated on the pears which were moldering in the bin and so she drove everybody crazy until they, the pears, had been mashed into another bin and covered with brandy since she didn’t want to make pear butter because the idea of peeling and coring an entire bin of pears was making her want to die, but the reason they were moldering was because they sat in her entry way for a week and then she drug them outside but then it rained and so essentially she was going to lose an entire bin of pears and the point is, she didn’t have time to cope with so many pears in the middle of everything else.

In other words, Perseverate is a great word and useful to anyone who finds himself, or herself, or xerself in a feedback loop. You may have absolute control over your thoughts, your lists, the order of your life, or you may be inclined to perseveration, to waking up before the derrière of rosy-fingered Dawn already spinning around a single inconsequential thought that seems more necessary and critical than everything else in your whole life and then go on with it for the rest of the day, never once emerging into some other more useful set of categories and ideas.

And it is great word for the news cycle which perseverates both intentionally and unintentionally relentlessly around one idea at the expense of all others, as if it has some broken life of its own. Which might be ok if the single item was always of such import that not to know about it would make me a smaller and more useless person. But, in fact, the news item of the day is more usually one that is not, in the whole scheme of things, important at all, like whatever unkind thing it was that Serena Williams did and said the other day, or what kind of bikini that Kardashian was wearing.

However, in defense of myself and my own natural tendencies, I would just like to inquire if it is so very bad to circle relentlessly and redundantly around an idea without being able to let it go? Or is it that most of us need a lot of time—years even—to chew over and consider something before moving on? Aren’t there some concepts or events or images or people that are worth perseverating over, perhaps even for the whole course of one’s life? Like Jesus maybe. Or the way light reflects off the water. Or the way the onion melts gently down into the pan over low heat. Or the way another person thinks.

Where is the impossibly narrow line between a good obsession and a bad one? Between circling so intensely that the vortex holds you in its grip so that you never fully emerge and the useful consideration of something so that it finally becomes a very whole and real part of who you are? And how would you know, standing on the outside looking in, wondering why that other person just can’t let that thought go?

There’s a lovely, probably apocryphal story about a little person with two cups and a tray. In one cup are some dry beans. In the other cup is nothing. The little person pours the beans into the empty cup, pauses, and then pours them back again. That little person keeps on in this way for so long that the on-looking grown up person, frustrated and angry, wanting that little person to move on to “something important,” eventually removes the cups, the tray, and the beans. The little person sits dolefully in the corner, pining for the beans and the cups and the tray. Finally the grown up person climbs down from her great knowledge and asks why that little person is so sad. And the little person says, “Well, when I poured the beans one way, I said one prayer, and when I poured the beans the other way, I said another prayer. I miss being able to pray in that way.” At which point the big person, stricken to the heart, restores the beans and the cups and the tray.

It is a mysterious wonder—the tangled human confusion of heart, mind, and soul. How little do we even know our own. How impossible it is to know those of another. I like to think of Jesus, doggedly making his way to the cross—going single-minded towards a reality that no one around him valued or desired. Everyone thought he was wrong, bad even. Some tried to correct him. Don’t say that, they said. That’s not useful. It seemed redundant and foolish. It looked like he was perseverating. It looked like he was wasting his life.

But he wasn’t. And maybe I’m not either. Maybe I just need more time. Maybe you do too. Maybe that gentle internal guide, the Holy Spirit himself, is working something out that none of us will properly understand for absolutely ages, like whole days or hours or even years.

Whatever you are perseverating on, I say go for it. Pears, Beans, Hurricanes, Jesus, SJWing, How You Always Forget Your Keys. But maybe don’t perseverate on the perseverating of others. Unless it’s your own special way of praying. In which case, that’s probably fine. I wouldn’t dream of judging. After all, I have to go stir my stupid pears.