Pivot

Here is my nominee for the 2020 word of the year—Pivot.

Pivot is often used to describe a strategy employed to address a difficult challenge. Rather than fight the challenge, you turn away from it and seek a new direction. In some ways we are all experiencing this with Covid 19. The patterns of our lives, how and whether we can stay in business, our finances, our interactions with friends and family—all of this has been upended due to this fiercely contagious virus and we have had to ‘pivot’ into a new reality. A far more quiet and restricted reality, unless you are a parent with school age children, and please know, my heart goes out to all of you. 

We have had to pivot to stay-at-home work, or no work at all. We have pivoted to ZOOM calls. We have pivoted to ordering everything online and rarely entering stores. We have pivoted by cancelling trips and gatherings with friends. And many thousands have pivoted into the challenge of fighting a dangerous virus, of hospitalizations and ventilators, of only seeing family through a window and the tragic loss of loved ones.

I wish we could go back to the time when pivot was what you did in a basketball game, right after you grabbed the ball and right before you nailed the shot. I hope pivot will soon be that hard to remember word in a crossword puzzle. Or a way to describe how a sprinkler works. I don’t want it to forever represent how dramatically all of our lives have changed. 

I hope for all of us that we can pivot away from this time, soon.

CEEGEE’S GIFT HAS BEEN RECOGNIZED IN SIX NATIONAL FICTION COMPETITIONS SINCE PUBLICATION.

IN AUGUST, THE AMERICAN BOOK AWARDS NAMED CEEGEE’S GIFT A   FINALIST IN THE 2020 YOUNG ADULT CATEGORY.