Woodburn: Make your heart go aflutter in New Year
Chase butterflies.
When asked to write a brief essay on the topic “A Letter Of Advice To My 21-Year-Old Self,” that was my answer in a nutshell: Chase butterflies.
As we toe the starting line for a new lap around the sun in 2023, it seems to me that chasing butterflies is timely counsel for all ages, old and young, not just 21. Let me explain.
Even though Spring is a fair ways off, turning the calendar page from December to January always brings to my mind a butterfly emerging from its cocoon: the caterpillar’s past has been shed and left behind and the world is fresh and full of promise.
Moreover, most butterflies emerge in the morning — again, the image of a new year’s rosy beginning. Indeed, New Year’s resolutions are goals for a personal metamorphosis of sorts.
But my prescription to chase butterflies is more than metaphorical. Remember in your youth when you raced, wielding a long-handled net, after Monarchs or Swallowtails? Few images of girlhood or boyhood are more carefree.
Perhaps you did not even catch any butterflies. That didn’t even matter because the joy was in the running, in the sport of it, in the zig-zagging through a field until you were out of breath — the breathlessness, in part, from laughing at your “failure” to catch the elusive flittering prey.
Lesson from the child: when was the last time you laughed off “failure” instead of letting it deflate you like a punctured tire? To be sure, we would all do well to pursue our adult endeavors with the same sense of joy and play we did while racing barefooted in the summer grass in happy pursuit of rainbow-winged flying flower.
Chasing butterflies means going outside your safe cocoon of a comfort zone. Ernest Hemingway once told a friend, who kept putting off undertaking a challenging task because he had never tried it before: “What’s that got to do with it? I had no experience writing a novel until I wrote the first one.”
As the Roman poet Virgil noted, “Fortune favors the bold.” Fortune favors butterfly chasers, say I.
In that essay letter to my 21-year-old college self, I wrote: “Remember the swarm of butterflies doing cartwheels in your stomach the first time you asked out that gorgeous girl you are now dating? Spoiler alert, Woody — that works out marvelously even 42 years later!”
Mark Twain wisely put it thusly: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
He might have well added: Do things that make the butterflies in your belly take flight.
So throw off your bowlines in 2023. Learn a new language. Take guitar lessons. Enroll in a painting class. Train for a marathon. Try surfing. Climb Mount Whitney. Write that novel you have long felt you have inside you. Ask someone on a date – or accept the invite. Chase your dreams. Travel. Explore. Go sailing. Go for it!
I closed my letter to my younger self with John Wooden’s “7-Point Creed,” which I consider to be concise wisdom of great breadth and depth: “Be true to yourself. Make each day your masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day. Pray for guidance and give thanks for your blessings every day.”
And I concluded with an eighth point: Chase butterflies.
Woody Woodburn writes a weekly column for The Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. His books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Woodburn: Make your heart go aflutter in New Year
