Grace. Together we four created a wonderful illustrated children's book, Gideon's Dream: A Tale of New Beginnings. According to Maddy, "It's a story about a little grub caterpillar who slogs through his day just doing the same old, same old until one day he gets stuck on a leaf that starts falling to Earth. And he gets the experience of flying and it's totally exhilarating to him. Yet once he falls to Earth he can't figure out how to make it happen again. It gets to the point where the little grub begins to dream about it and think about it all the time-daydreaming, dreaming at night.
So he goes off into the meadow all by himself and he builds a little place to live and he starts trying to figure out how to have his dream come true.
And the next thing you know, he reinvents himself as a buttlerfly.
In this book we attempted to craft a hopeful story for the ages, a story for parents to read to their children, for children to be influenced by, and even for kids and grandparents to share together.
Let Your Inner Butterfly Loose
My daughter, Casey, and my son, Zak, are terrific young adults. At twenty- one, Casey is set to finish college and develop her own unique game plan and philosophy of life. She's learning to relate to all sorts of people, has wonderful close friends, and has been sorting out her hopes and dreams regarding her career. In her field of study, media and communications, her insights and budding talents dazzle me. She is emerging as a wise, charismatic, and powerful young woman. At eighteen, Zak has just left the nest to begin his college life. I look at the books on the shelf in his newly vacant bedroom and I'm amazed: The Sun Also Rises, Siddhartha,
The Iliad, Childhood's End, to name a few. I enjoy watching him try to make sense of all that is going on in his life, like any teen-getting to know the opposite sex, contemplating a field of study. He, too, is already showing promising signs of thoughtfulness and leadership. Yet at their ages, there is so much that my kids don't yet know or understand-from politics and business to relationships and struggle and hardship. They're still young. Their inner butterflies are still taking shape.
I, on the other hand, have those extra forty years of ups and downs, problems and solutions, arguments won and lost, disappointments, successes, learning what works and what doesn't. My inner butterfly-the sum of my experiences and how they make me feel and behave-is just waiting to burst forth. Yours may be too. Your life experiences (and you've had literally thousands of them) give you the critical knowledge you need to reach your full potential in middlescence. There are so many valuable assets that come with age. You probably have more seasoned people skills. You can better separate what's important from what is not.
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