If I were to ask you who inspires you, or  what your favorite mantra or quote is, you probably think of a famous dead person. Steve Jobs, Dalai Lama, Maya Angelou, Einstein, John Lennon, and so many more legends fall into this category. In fact, search famous quotes and you’ll be bombarded with a myriad of results all to make you feel better about your day, current situation, or to send a passive aggressive message to someone who has wronged you (we’ve all done it). I’m here to tell you to stop. All the sunset and beautiful bucket-list worthy images with inspirations written in the middle. Enough. While these people certainly paved the way, I find it interesting that we think older people (or dead people) have more wisdom. Yet, If you’re at work and have to live through one of those ice breaking exercises you probably utter one of the above names without thinking about it. 

Do you know who inspires me? My kids. Our eldest son had a swim meet this past weekend and as his first  one it was a learning curve for both of us. His last event of the 2-jammed packed days was the 500 yard freestyle race. 500 yards = 20 laps…20 laps! He had about 4 hours between events and the anxiety was building. How would he know what lap he was on? Was he good enough? Could he do this? Of course all the encouragement didn’t snuff out his anxiety and after a while I started to feel it right along with him. We wanted this race to be over. Finally it was his time. He stood on that block and when the buzzer went off everything fell into place, he swam his heart out and completed 20 laps in 8 minutes. He came in last, but first in my eyes. I cried. He did it. I was inspired by his strength. 

The truth is we idolize dead people, we put them on a pedestal. Yes, they deserve it, but those living on those starting blocks, they are the ones who will pave the next generation. Why don’t we idolize our kids, younger generations? We pick on younger generations, the avocado toast eating kind, I’m guilty of it myself, but this generation, our kids have been through some pretty intense situations. They had to learn in different ways, adapt to seeing their friends on screens instead of at recess, learn how to read body language through eyes instead of a full face. We masked them, we made them stay inside, we pushed them in ways that was foreign and they grew up a little older than they should have. Now they are living through a new situation, war. Yet through all of this they were resilient, better and more adapted than a lot of adults I know. Inspiring. 

We encourage our kids and idolize adults. Let’s stop and look at the younger generation, our own kids. Let’s light up social media with those inspiring quotes to get you through a rough week, a Monday, or a bad situation with words from our own kids…let’s see our kids for what they are, standing on the starting block waiting to take that plunge and keep swimming into the unknown. It’s not easy, life sucks sometimes but maybe, just maybe if adults see them as inspiring they’ll start to think they are as well. As for my son, well, just keep swimming Everett. You inspire me.