A Walk With Evie — And the Questions That Would Not Leave

Long before Welcome to Your Becoming became a website or a book project, Dr. Stephen Rue had spent much of his professional life listening to people during periods of profound change.

For decades as a lawyer, he sat across from people experiencing divorce, family conflict, fear, uncertainty, rejection, loss, and the sudden realization that life was no longer going to unfold according to plan.

He understood transition professionally.

Then transition became personal.

Stephen's mother died on December 22, 2025, at the age of eighty-eight after a brief nineteen-day battle with acute myeloid leukemia.

Nineteen days.

There are periods of time that can divide a life into before and after.

This was one of his.

Grief created questions that professional experience, academic study, accomplishments, and titles could not answer.

What do the people we love actually know about how we feel?

Why do we wait to say things that matter?

Why do we so often postpone connection until another day?

What happens when another day never comes?

Out of that experience came a sentence that has remained close to the heart of this project:

"Speak your love into the living world."

Do not wait until the chair is empty.

Tell people what they mean to you while they can still hear you.

But Welcome to Your Becoming did not grow only from grief.

It also grew from walking.

Stephen often walks with his Cavapoo, Evie.

On those walks, the noise of professional life becomes quieter.

There are no courtroom arguments.

No legal files.

No meetings.

Sometimes there is simply a road, the evening air, Evie walking beside him, and enough silence for questions to rise.

One evening, Stephen noticed fireflies.

Their light became a metaphor.

Fireflies glow for many reasons, but one of those reasons is connection.

They signal.

They seek one another.

And walking there with Evie, Stephen began thinking about people in much the same way.

Perhaps human beings glow too.

Perhaps we signal to one another:

I am here.

Do you see me?

Can you hear me?

Will you walk with me?

That became part of what Stephen calls The Firefly Road.

The moment did not require a grand stage.

It happened during a walk with a little dog.

But sometimes the smallest moments open the largest questions.

Stephen began asking more people to tell him about their lives.

Not simply what they did for work.

Not their résumé.

Not their public identity.

He wanted to know what changed them.

What they had lost.

Whom they loved.

What they regretted.

Who had stood beside them.

What they had survived.

What they had learned.

What they still hoped for.

And people answered.

One story became another.

A hospice nurse.

A mother living with a spinal cord injury.

A trainer who had once been told what he might never do again.

A man in England reflecting on friendship.

A woman who made the conscious decision to start saying "I love you."

People grieving.

People beginning again.

People searching for purpose.

People who wanted, perhaps more than anything else, to be seen, heard, and understood.

Stephen discovered that the more he listened, the less this felt like a book he was writing about other people.

It became a book being created with them.

Welcome to Your Becoming is the result.

It is a project about the questions that arise when life changes.

About the people who help us continue.

About the ordinary moments that quietly shape who we are.

And about the belief that every person — regardless of what they have experienced or who they are — deserves to be seen, heard, and understood.