One of my greatest simple pleasures is one I couldn’t escape even if I wanted to: words. I love words. Fat ones, skinny ones, juicy ones, sleek ones that say just what you want them to say. I love them in prose, in poetry, in crossword puzzles and song lyrics—even in dictionaries and thesauri. Though I’ve never read the dictionary, when I look something up, I find myself wandering through the opened pages looking for gems. For instance, did you know that thingummy (an alternative of the earlier thingum) is in the dictionary, and is defined as “thingamajig”?

I love words that sound like what they describe: buzz, hiss, murmur, boom, clank, sniff. I love words that conjure up images and emotions: ephemera, molten, doppelganger, begrudge, noodling.

Photo: manumohan.com “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”—Mark Twain

I jot down favorite words, words I don’t know the exact meaning of, and phrases that capture my imagination. My favorite crossword puzzles feature plays on words, and there is a certain feeling I get when I know I’ve got the right word for the clue, even when—especially when—it involves an unusual usage.

I count myself lucky to work and play with words every day. There’s nothing quite like the little frisson that runs up my spine when I read or write just the right word. The perfect turn of phrase (and isn’t that a lovely, artisan-like expression?) feels completely satisfying. Words are more than my tools. They are my friends.

What are your favorite words?

When we're young, it seems there are endless possibilities for lives we might lead, and then as we grow older and the opportunities get fewer we begin to realize that the life we've been given is the only one we're likely to get. Here's Jean Nordhaus, of the Washington, D.C. area, exploring this process. [Introduction by Ted Kooser.]

I Was Always Leaving

I was always leaving, I was
about to get up and go, I was
on my way, not sure where.
Somewhere else. Not here.
Nothing here was good enough.

It would be better there, where I
was going. Not sure how or why.
The dome I cowered under
would be raised, and I would be released
into my true life. I would meet there

the ones I was destined to meet.
They would make an opening for me
among the flutes and boulders,
and I would be taken up. That this
might be a form of death

did not occur to me. I only know
that something held me back,
a doubt, a debt, a face I could not
leave behind. When the door
fell open, I did not go through.

American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright ©2008 by Jean Nordhaus, whose most recent book of poems is Innocence, Ohio State University Press, 2006. Poem reprinted from The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 21, no. 4, Winter, 2008, by permission of Jean Nordhaus and the publisher. Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.

I finished a large (for me) writing project late on Wednesday, and when I shared that information with a friend the next day, she said in an email, “That must feel good to have those articles done and delivered! Hope you're taking time to savor that feeling.”

Uh, not really.

What I did instead was rush right into the next things on my to-do list. Because other areas of my life had been neglected while I concentrated on my deadline, instead of taking the time to feel good about what I’d just done, I felt I had to leap into action and get those areas back in line. Instead of focusing on what I'd done, I focused on what was left undone. It wasn't until after I read and thought about what my friend wrote that I began to allow myself to savor a feeling of accomplishment.

To savor is to take delight in something. Accomplishing something you set out to do, like meeting a challenging deadline, is something to savor. I write frequently about slowing down and appreciating what we have—probably because these are lessons I’m still learning. These concepts are important to me. Perhaps through reading and writing about them, I’ll finally learn the lessons for good. Or maybe those lessons don’t get learned “for good”—rather, each time I revisit them, I explore some new nuance or facet of the concept. I think I do a pretty decent job of appreciating the good things in my life...maybe it's now time for me to learn to take delight in my own accomplishments.

Maybe you can help me with this process. How do you savor your accomplishments and the good things in your life? Whatever you do, I hope you have much to savor this weekend.

Something to savor