What your kids need most from their bedtime story is what you bring to it even without the story, but you can bring the right kind of stories to your children even if no one has written them down in a book.
1. Think of a type of badly-adapted pet: Junkyard dogs, for example, or too-timorous cats. If you have trouble coming up with ideas, eavesdrop in the waiting room at the vet’s office.
2. Write your story, showing why the animal’s behavior, rooted in a long-standing error, is frustrating his pursuit of an affectionate thriving. He learns better and, with practice, does better – and everyone is better off at the end. In my country, we call that a benedy.
3. Rinse and repeat.
Sales and marketing are on you, but this idea will sell, sell, sell.
Why?
Because broken human beings are badly-adapted mammals, too – and your kids understand that better than you do.
We refer analogically to scared rabbits, but a too-timorous child (or adult!) has, so far, met with too few rationally-appropriate responses to unexpected events or injuries. You can lecture that kid for his entire life – nice job you’re doing at that, by the way; very thorough – but until he sees that his fears are disproportionate, he will not do better because he has not learned better.
Big duh, right? Life is a benedy: You make mistakes, and ideally you learn from them. And telling that one story – benedy – in seven billion different ways is the job narrative art does best.
This little pet of an idea is free to a good home: You have within you the power to thrive by cultivating thriving – not just shaling for Splendor but scaling it by sowing new sowers-of-seed-sowers – shedding a grace that sheds infinitely-more grace.
Oh, you’re not the writer I’m looking for? Everyone is. What your kids need most from their bedtime story is what you bring to it even without the story, but you can bring the right kind of stories to your children even if no one has written them down in a book.
You hope to change things – while there’s still time? Only at bedtime do you finally get around to talking to the decision-makers – the people who are going to get the job done. If you teach your little mammals affectionate thriving before they’ve acquired habits-of-mind that will frustrate them for life – well, that’s the whole job, isn’t it? They’ll take care of the rest.
So spin them yarns, either by writing them down or just by embroidering the air by night-light’s glow. Morality plays are dross to the already-corrupted, but they are gold itself to people who have not yet broken humanity’s promise. Shed your grace now and the children you share it with will bring it back in sheaves, someday.
And that’s how you mix metaphors!
Seriously: If you can do this, there’s a career in here for you. Set it up by monthly-subscription and you will disintermediate the disintermediaters. But whatever you do, shed grace to children – yours and every child you meet. The example of you set by your rationally-appropriate responses to life is the story they most need to revel in.
