Well, hello there. It's Morgan Harper-Nichols here and welcome to today's episode, which is called

When You Are Only Just Beginning, is Hard to Believe. So for a little bit of context, I wrote a

book called You Are Only Just Beginning that was released this year, 2023. And it's a book about lessons for

the journey ahead. And each chapter focuses on a particular motif, whether that is a monarch

butterfly or a guitar or the ocean. And really digging into each of those motifs as a representation of a

different part of one's life story. And it is definitely tied to my own story and me trying to learn

how to look ahead. But sometimes it's just so hard to imagine that you're

just getting started or you are only just beginning, especially when you think about a larger

picture of one's life and knowing that, okay, there's going to be a

certain number of days that I am here. And that might be for some a morbid thought. But for

others, that might be something that someone is having to think about,

whether it's a health concern or it's just how long they've lived. It might be something that

is more pressing. So this idea of your only just beginning might seem kind of hard to grasp at times.

And even if there isn't something that is a specific thing that is pressing in your own life,

that is making you think that, perhaps it's just the state of the world or the state of

different things going on in your life that

really make it challenging to really see it that way. This is something that I deal with myself.

And when I approach this idea of your only just beginning, it came from a place of me recognizing something. And it has to do with monarch butterflies. Now

monarch butterflies, I've talked about them before and they get a lot of airtime in the last part of the book.

However, what I learned about them, it really was a very sobering realization. So I just wanted to reiterate

that as I talk about this idea of you are only just beginning and when it's hard to believe.

So the monarch butterfly, the part of the migration cycle can be as in North America can be as far south as Mexico and as far north as Canada.

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