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May Your First Word Be Adventure And Last Word Love.

-Bruce Feiler

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May Your First Word

Bruce Feiler

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May Your First Word Be Adventure And Last Word Love.

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Love Is A Story We Tell With Another Person. It's Cocreation Through Conarration. When You Hit Bumps In The Road And Challenges, You Write A New Chapter In Your Story Together. Love Is The Constant Act Of Revising And Retelling Your Own Story In Real Time. You Don't Do It By Yourself. You Do It With Someone Else. The Only Way You Do That Is To Talk To Each Other And Create A Shared Narrative.

My Name Is Bruce Feiler, And I'm An Explainaholic. I First Heard This Word Used To Describe Isaac Asimov, And I Knew Instantly That I Suffered From The Same Condition. It's The Incurable Desire To Tell, Shape, Share, Occasionally Exaggerate, Often Elongate, And Inevitably Bungle A Good Story.

When You Hit The Unimaginable, The Only Answer Is Imaginativeness. You Have To Heal With The Person That You're Suffering With. You Have To Write A New Chapter In Your Story. A Relationship Can Be A Sacred Thing, But It's Going To Be Difficult. There Are Going To Be Challenges. You Are Going To Have Pain. But Working It Through And Being Resilient Is As Sacred And Meaningful As Having A "hollywood" Romance.

When Faced With A Challenge, Happy Families, Like Happy People, Just Add A New Chapter To Their Life Story That Shows Them Overcoming The Hardship. This Skill Is Particularly Important For Children, Whose Identity Tends To Get Locked In During Adolescence.

May Your First Word Be Adventure And Last Word Love.

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I'd Say My Best Memory Was Climbing Mt. Fuji, And The Worst Memory Was... Trying To Fit My Feet Into The Free Giveaway Slippers At Japanese Schools.

I Was So Naive About Writing, I Went To The Public Library And Checked Out The Only Volume They Had On The Topic - An Academic Treatise About Publishing From The Wwii Era.

When It Comes To Gender, Marriage, Family, Work, And Religion - We Once Thought Of Them As Being Fixed, But They're Incredibly Fluid. The Same Is True For Love. Love Was Not Something That Was Originally Built Between Two Equal Partners In A Relationship. It's Something That's Been Hard-earned Over Time.

Love Is A Balance Between Independence And Interdependence. In Love, You Want To Be Independent And Interdependent. You Want To Be A Little Bit Selfish And A Little Bit Selfless. Love Can Be An Antidote To Loneliness, As Long As There Is Some Aloneness In It.

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One Of The Things I've Learned Is To Be Much More Open About My Frailties And About Our Failures, Because When You Show Your Kids How You Can Resolve Conflict In Your Life In Real Time, You're Giving Them Confidence That When They Have Conflicts, They Can Push Through Them.

Children Who Plan Their Own Goals, Set Weekly Schedules, Evaluate Their Own Work Build Up Their Frontal Cortex And Take More Control Over Their Lives.

Adam And Eve - And Especially Eve - Are Victims Of The Greatest Character Assassination The World Has Ever Known. Eve Is Not Secondary. Eve, If Anything, Is The Great Initiator In The Story. She's The First Independent Woman. For Me, Rediscovering That Eve Was The Greatest Bad**s Women Of All Time Was A Revelation.

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One Day, My Daughter Tybee Came To Me, And She Said, ‘i Have So Much Love For You In My Body, Daddy, I Can’t Stop Giving You Hugs And Kisses. And When I Have No More Love Left, I Just Drink Milk, Because That’s Where Love Comes From.’

I Had Always Believed That I Left A Bit Of Me Wherever I Went. I Also Believed That I Took A Bit Of Every Place With Me.

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Moses Is Our True Founding Father.

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If You Tell Your Own Story To Your Children - That Includes Your Positive Moments And Your Negative Moments, And How You Overcame Them - You Give Your Children The Skills And The Confidence They Need To Feel Like They Can Overcome Some Hardship That They've Felt.

Even Superman's Name Reflects His Creators' Biblical Knowledge.

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The Bottom Line: If You Want A Happier Family, Create, Refine And Retell The Story Of Your Family's Positive Moments And Your Ability To Bounce Back From The Difficult Ones. That Act Alone May Increase The Odds That Your Family Will Thrive For Many Generations To Come.

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