It was spring of 2018 and we were playing with words.
Lloyd and I had already been introduced to nada, the Spanish word for nothing and todo, the Spanish word for everything or all, and now, in his Chevy Colorado on the way to Texas Roadhouse in Des Moines, we were having fun.
Why not create one word that held the meaning of both?
We tried the obvious first: nadatodo. It sounded odd though, and todo sounded more like a puppy’s name! Besides, everything or all, were finite words with boundaries. What if there was something beyond all? Or something beyond everything? Could there be a word that made a better fit with nada?
By the time we arrived to the parking lot of Texas Roadhouse, we had given up on nadatodo and were about to exit the truck when Lloyd looked over at me and said, “What about more?
We decided to try it on: nadamore. After repeating it several times and noticing the musical sound of it, we knew really liked it. We loved the paradox embedded in the word, and knew that at its core, the meaning reflected the lives we had been living and the lives we wanted to live into the future.
When nadamore as a word was coined in that parking lot, we had no idea it would eventually become the place we now call home or a way to think about the ongoing journey of our lives.
V.