From the founder: The year the math stopped working.
Donald J. Claxton
Founder, The Ameriquins™
As the calendar turned and America stepped into 2026, I was looking at a different kind of clock.
On January 1, 2025, I calculated there were 7,092 days left until I turn 80. Throughout the year, I treated those days like clean data points. I spent them planning my business, my projects, and my life. All with the precision of a CNC woodworking program.
On September 24, 2025, the math stopped negotiating.
My heart decided that number was a suggestion.
A heart attack, followed by a triple bypass on October 1, stripped away the illusion of control.
The irony still stings. By nature, I am a builder and designer obsessed with systems. I did this while ignoring the increasing intensity of the warnings my body flashed at me for months.
You may recognize some of them yourself: Shortness of breath. Pressure. Fatigue.
These served as small alarms that I kept explaining away with busyness and grit.
That September morning, my many organizational spreadsheets stopped mattering.
The last one-third of 2025 was no longer about productivity.
Life and a near death turned these last three months into a reckoning.
What I thought I was building.
At the start of 2025, my life looked organized from the outside.
I am a lifelong woodworker, innovator, and storyteller. I had tools, systems, timelines—plans drawn tighter than dovetail joints. The Ameriquins™ 13 characters are part of that plan.
But none of it answered the question that caught up with me as I laid there with a Swan-Ganz catheter in my neck post-op:
Why does this deserve to exist?
Somewhere between surgery and long walks of recovery, the answer began to surface. I crossed a threshold many creators never reach:
I stopped building for momentum and started building for endurance.
The year in two halves.
January–September: Competence without clarity.
Throughout the first two-thirds of 2025, was discipline, productivity, and busyness.
My CNC craft improved—tighter tolerances, cleaner cuts, better finishes, better systems. On paper, the work plans looked solid.
The Ameriquins™ began to mature as well.
The Ameriquin Eagle™ stopped feeling like a mascot and became a keystone symbol. The other characters became the best way to carry civic memory forward. Most important of all, to do so without turning every decision into a lecture or a fight.
The months taught hard truths about timing, structure, and independence. We made strategic pivots—not out of frustration, but to bring greater clarity.
Still, beneath it all, my life lived on a fault line.
I treated my body like shop equipment and Mac computers. My time like inventory. My calling like one more project to manage.
September 24: When the timeline broke.
Heart attacks are brutal and efficient editors. I’ve had some doozies through my years as a writer. But this?
Heart attacks burn away assumptions and leave one question standing:
What remains when you don’t get the time you assumed you had?
Recovery: Constraints as Clarifiers
A triple bypass is more than a medical event. It is a stripping away.
Recovery at my age is slow, specific, and humbling. You learn what your body can no longer do. You learn what your mind will not tolerate anymore. You learn how much energy you were wasting on things that never deserved any attention at all.
By December, my cholesterol dropped from 170 to 84. So did my A1c. My doctors want both lower still. That means more lifestyle changes ahead in 2026 and beyond.
But the deeper lesson is not numerical. It was this:
Constraints aren’t cages. They’re clarifiers.
When your energy becomes precious, you stop spending it on frivolous noise.
The foundation that emerged: Five Stars of Freedom.™
Somewhere between the cardiac unit and cardiac rehab, the Ameriquins™ changed. They stopped being a creative project and became a responsibility.
A framework took shape. Simple enough for children, strong enough for adults, sturdy enough to build on. We call this the Five Stars of Freedom:™
- Speak Truth — Listen. Be honest. Respect every voice.
- Worship Freely — Believe boldly or not at all. We all belong.
- Stand Together — Help your neighbor. Celebrate our shared home.
- Lead with Integrity — When something’s broken, fix it.
- Write the Next Chapter — Learn. Teach. Dream bigger.
These aren’t slogans.
They’re structural steel.
They explain what the Ameriquins are for: Civics we can feel. (Check out our YouTube Channel.) A way for families, classrooms, and communities to talk about America without arguing.
What we built via the Ameriquins.™
By the end of 2025, the work evolved into something far better than the original concepts:
- The Ameriquins™ — protected, coherent characters with room to grow.
- A philosophy of AI collaboration — We do not use AI. We work with it.
- A voice that doesn’t seek permission — willing to collaborate, but not dependent.
Most people spend decades trying to align craft, purpose, and structure. With God’s prayerful guidance, this happened in one year.
One where two-thirds was on autopilot, and one-third in full awareness of mortality.
The quiet shift that changed everything.
Before the heart attack, my guiding question was simple:
Will this work?
Afterward, it changed:
Does this deserve to exist after I’m gone?
That is not morbid thinking. It is the essence of stewardship.
This shift made me even more exact with language, because words outlive us. More protective of my intellectual properties, because ownership is responsibility. More comfortable saying no, because time is not renewable. More patient with ideas, because durability needs curing time—like finish on wood.
The Ameriquins made my faith more active. I see God’s fingerprints in recovery milestones. He nestled them into second chances. Clarity arrived when I stopped rushing past what matters.
Should I attribute this to the surgery? Mortality? A newfound way to listen?
My guess is all three.
Why the Ameriquins™ will endure.
The idea of the Ameriquins™ was always to highlight the last 250 years and write the next chapter for 250 more. They’re design is one of continuity.
Timelines compress. Priorities shift. Structures change. That’s reality.
The characters and their stories stand without a dependance on conditions beyond control.
From the beginning, the Ameriquins™ stood on their own foundation. One guided by clear principles and protected by intentional structure. One flexible enough to serve families, classrooms, and communities for years to come.
Their function is not to serve as mascots or as an entire campaign.
Each post on ameriquins.com and social media, and video on YouTube (Check out our YouTube Channel.) builds on a body of work meant to last.
2026 is a celebratory year for the nation. We mark 250 years since the Founders declared our independence from English rule. Building on America remains imperfect. The concept of people governing themselves endures as an experiment.
There will be moments of remembrance, education, and pride across the country, and that is as it should be. Last night, confetti fell in Times Square and the Washington Monument glowed in patriotic colors. Beautiful reminders that America’s 250th birthday will be spectacular.
The Ameriquins™ do not exist to commemorate an anniversary. They mean to serve the generations living inside it.
The goal is to help all Americans carry forward the humanity nestled within the history.
We mean for the usefulness of our work to live long after the passage of 2026.
The real win of 2025.
On January 1, 2026, the math says I have 6,727 days until I turn 80.
We’ve all lost another 365 days to the calendar.
In my case, ignorance almost cost me 6,800 days and the silence of eternity.
But this led to something more valuable than momentum:
purpose that survives fatigue, fear, and friction.
The mission and purpose no longer focus on building a business.
Others work with me now to build on the body of work. One that fuses craft, citizenship, faith, and technology into something that says:
This matters.
If even fragments survive me, the days weren’t wasted.
Especially the hard ones.
What this means for you.
If you’re a maker, parent, teacher, or builder, hear this from someone who almost ran out of “later:”
- Stop optimizing for output. Start building for permanence.
- Stop ignoring warning signs. Your body does not negotiate.
- Stop waiting for permission. Create systems you own.
- Stop treating AI like a shortcut. Use it to protect quality when energy dips.
The work that endures is not always the work that sprints.
Sometimes the most important year is the one that slows you down. Delays you long enough to lay a foundation that can outlast you—
even if you don’t get all 6,727 days.
Especially if you don’t.
Donald J. Claxton
Founder, The Ameriquins™
Woodworker. Storyteller. Builder of heirlooms where craft meets civic purpose.
Well said. The year that slows you down provides a totally new perspective on what really matters in your life. Who really matters in your life. And what future direction makes a difference in your life as well as those you love and care about. A lesson obviously well earned, Donny. Leaving a legacy of family, friends and creativity is so important. Happy 2026 and many more!