Press Pause

“The days are long and the years are short.”

How is it that another year has flown by and yet at the same time, we are often struggling to get through the day? How are the kids in our lives growing up so fast? How are we fighting wrinkles already? How are the times changing so fast while the clock often slows to a lazy crawl? How can we reconcile these two seemingly opposite realities?

There has been a lot of talk about being in the present moment (this of course is a huge part of yoga practice), and I never really understood the way that this idea fits in and affects our lives until I started thinking about it in terms of the passage of time. Pressing pause on a regular basis, even when you aren’t sitting on a yoga mat, enables us to grasp and hold on to time instead of letting it float away forever. Pressing pause enables us to remember not just the really awesome and significant moments (which we remember really easily) but also the relatively insignificant, simpler, smaller moments...the ones that seem like ones we might want to forget in the moment but often turn out to be more significant in the long run.

I have easily gone for weeks without taking the time to actually acknowledge the current moment I’m in, and then, whether some days are challenge to get through or end up feeling mundane, a month has gone by and I have no idea what I did a week ago. Whether we fly or crawl through our long days, we often just try to get through them instead of being OK with being in them.

If we can press pause a few times a day to acknowledge where we are, we can better justify the passage of time because we’ll end up with a series of moments we consciously recognized and stored in our memory bank. In other words, all this time went by, but all of these moments were recognized and mentally noted. It’s not enough to live the moments; you need to consciously recognize that you are living these moments, sort of like the feeling of a lucid dream.

What day is it? Where are you? What do you see? What are you doing? How do you feel? Why? All those feelings, whether positive or negative, are so important to recognize. It’s allowing you to be honest with yourself.

Today is Monday, December 31, 2018 (wait...is it actually Monday?), it’s New Year’s Eve and I’m reflecting on the past year. I slept in way too long, but I’m not going to feel guilty about it because it felt really nice. Right now, I’m writing something, my neck hurts and my kids are playing upstairs.

There. To some degree, I’ve paused and noted where I am in the day. I’ve landed in the moment instead of floating above and through it, whereby I’d probably be unable to go back a week from now and remember any specific details or feelings about the day.  

I have tried to do this regularly for a lot of this past year, and I can honestly report that when I spend a month or two straight just pausing a few times a day to recognize the date, time and place—my physical and emotional setting—the time doesn’t seem to fly as fast and instead of feeling like I have let go of a few weeks instead of being in them, I can look back and feel like the actual passage of time aligns with my feeling about that passage of time. They match up more like two parallel lines than one scribble and nothing more.

Here and there, I’ve managed to write things down in a journal daily, which is an even better way to document the pressing of pause and remember the days, but if that’s not your thing, just know that merely stopping to just be here will make a huge difference.

Press pause today, tomorrow and the next day. Once it becomes a habit, you’ll feel calmer and more refreshed. The days may always feel longer than the years in general, but you can bridge the gap between the two by landing in the present moment, daily, to take stock of where you are and drop a pin in that location. Perhaps you’ll be better able to reflect on the path you took to get here and see how many turns you made, how many ups and downs you navigated, to help reconcile the amount of time it actually took to get here.

I hope you have a very Happy New Year and a very awesome 2019!

The Opinions of Others and the Muddy Puddle Problem

“I don’t care about what other people think of me” is a phrase that I have been unable to utter, my entire life. I have always wondered at the amount of times I’ve read that phrase or versions of it in interviews and heard successful people tout it in terms of their successes. There’s a good chance that you, yeah, you, reading this right now, think, “I don’t care what anyone thinks about me, and I never have, big deal”; meanwhile, I’m over here thinking, “yeah that’s great, good for you because it is a strong quality to have, but I could never not care about that.”

I have always thought that as a people-pleaser, someone who is emotionally crippled at the thought of someone being upset at me, disappointed in me, or just plain doesn’t like me, caring about what other people think is simply a part of me. It's my burden to bear. I could never change. I never thought it was an issue, really; in fact, I’ve often wished I could know how others saw me so I could have a better sense of what my good qualities are, what to change and how to improve. In other words, I have used my imagined sense of others’ opinions of me as a benchmark for my own personal success.

A little tweak of the way I dress here, a little twist of the way I talk there, I will confess that I have slanted myself here and there in order to be the person that [I think] others know me to be or want me to be or expect me to be. (That was hard to write because I’m not proud of this.) These slight variations don’t go deep enough to compromise my true self, but they are enough make me appear a bit wishy-washy at times.

I have finally, slowly, been able to uncover the truth of the matter:  that this is a problem because I’m letting my own personal colours bleed into the colours of others, and letting those colours bleed into mine, creating a muddy puddle of non-colour, much like the cup of dirty water you use to clean a paint brush in over and over again.

By trying to be several interpretations of one person, I just become a muddy puddle of non-colour. What’s more is that this is all based on my perceptions; nobody knows what anyone else actually thinks. We’ll never know what people actually think; only what they choose to say. Everyone is entitled to their opinions anyway, whether they voice them or not. And honestly, we all probably don’t spend all that much time thinking about other people and what we like about them and what we don’t. And if we knew, it would be overwhelming, confusing, and ultimately not worth worrying about. Right?

This type of muddy puddle person is not the type of person that people like—a crushing revelation to someone who is trying to gain approval! Be yourself, right? This is what people say all the time. After all, isn’t it refreshing to hear someone say something true and honest, even if it is a shock? I love it when someone speaks their mind without restraint or without painting it a different colour than it actually is. Raw honesty is so beautiful.

I’ve finally begun to notice the negative effects of this way of thinking—of all the caring about what people think. The muddy puddle. The subsequent deeper question of who I really am—who one really is. The feeling of “not fully myself” vs. the confident feeling of “really myself.” I have started to see a glimpse of the crucial importance of outlining myself in some black permanent marker so my colours don’t bleed as much and diffuse into a grayish puddle of non-colour.

A huge part of not caring about what other people think is letting go of things we can hold onto as measurements of value. Letting go of trying to please people when the true you just can't because your values don’t line up with that other person’s—and being OK with being different. Letting go of the conception of beauty that you are trying to embody when your own physical features just can’t reflect that conception of beauty (instead, they reflect your own conception of beauty—your own kind of beautiful). Letting go of whatever others expect you to be—letting go of needing to be just that—by getting to know yourself better so you can properly understand your own outlines and just what shape you take. Letting go of wanting to be something else and instead accepting the person you are, the space you occupy, the specific type of influence you hold. By understanding these aspects of yourself, you can determine how you feel you need to improve upon what you already are, rather than stretching in weird positions to jump over to another, completely “not you” conception of yourself. (It’s awkward.)

I can’t believe how many years I have been governed by the pressure to guess what others have thought and modify accordingly, waiting for a tidbit of approval to keep me going. I’m throwing this out into the open with the hopes that it will give me some accountability to step out of my muddy puddle and stay out of it.

I hope that this can shed some light for anyone else out there who has cared too much about what other people think—cared to the point of allowing the opinions of others to affect your expression of yourself to the world. Reinforce your own colours by outlining your values, your awesome personality traits, your passions and your strengths so that your colours brighten up and are clearer and more visible to the world. We need you and your bright colours because nobody else reflects them in quite the same way that you do!

Talk to me or message me about your thoughts on this topic! How have you been able to ignore or walk past the opinions of others? What gives you confidence in yourself? How do you walk the straight line without wavering to the right or the left?

Modern Unhappiness

Two or three months ago, I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt really happy. I realized that most of the time, I was just doing all the things I had to do, and it felt like there was never time, opportunity or energy to do anything I wanted to do. I felt like all my responsibilities were weighing heavily on me, all competing for my attention, none of them getting enough, leaving me feeling like a failure in all departments.

I even wrote about happiness (posted on my blog here) last year. I had realized how important it was to find happiness right in your current moment instead of waiting for it on some faraway horizon, and it helped me a lot to go through that exercise. However, somewhere along the way, I lost that happy feeling and it was replaced by worry, stress and the feeling of being overwhelmed. I just felt like there were a lot of negative aspects of life to deal with now, and they always overshadow the positive ones. I fell into a woe hole and couldn’t get out.

I started to wonder if this unhappiness was just a part of getting used to the stage of life I’m at now, compared to my life as a teenager/20-something-year-old. More responsibilities, more things to worry about, less free time, less opportunities to do the things that were considered happy fun 15 or 20 years ago.

This was depressing me even more, so instead of thinking about the stage of life I’m in, I zoomed out and started thinking about the stage of history we are in. We’re dealing with new technology to which nobody before us has had to adjust. Every time something massively and significantly new is introduced, it takes time for people to get used to it. Just like any relationship, after we rejoice in the benefits, the positives, the novelties, we start to see the detriments, the negatives, the realities.

Over the past ten or so years, we’ve begun to live in the world of social media. We’re connected, but are we too connected? We see everyone’s up close and personal lives (at least, what they choose to share) every day. We see the best photos of someone when we feel our worst, exhausted from the day. We see friends’ and families’ vacation photos, feel happy for them, but also feel a side of sadness that we aren’t on vacation. We see people posting about the positive relationships they have and can’t help but hold up the relationships we have and compare them, maybe feeling bad about being bitchy to our husband when someone just posted about how in love he or she is with their spouse.

We can’t help but compare, I guess, even though we know we shouldn’t. We can’t even be completely happy for the people we love because we can’t help but position our lives against theirs, noticing all the ways we don’t measure up. No generation before us has had the same barrage of images at their fingertips on a daily basis to peruse and position and zoom in and react to as the people alive today. And it’s hard. It’s really hard to not feel jealous of a celebrity who just had a baby and looks beautiful and has full-time nannies to help her. It’s really hard not to feel a twinge when you see people hanging out and doing something fun when you are lying in bed, exhausted from the day, not doing anything fun.

Isn’t it ironic that the advancements associated with the Internet and smart phones that are supposed to make our lives easier and better actually make them harder?

It’s great that emails come straight to your phone, but it blurs the line between work and leisure time. It’s great that you can Google anything, but that black hole of the Internet is easy to fall into—it’s a slippery slope that blurs the eyes, overwhelms the mind and can eat up so much time...and can we even remember all we read?

It’s great that you can buy clothes online, but now companies pump out “new arrivals” at least monthly, and when you start looking for a specific item, you can get lost in the Internet. Just lost in the Internet. I have started looking for something I wanted and found myself on boutique web sites based out of Australia, wondering, how did I get to Australia? These are cool things, neat conveniences, a massive amount of options, but also way too many options.

We see ads tailored to products we have searched for, we are pressured to buy, we are pressured to keep up with trends in home decorating, fashion, jokes, news, and it all flies by so fast, like running to catch up to a train but never managing to jump on it.

New technology is always cool, but it has the propensity to create just as much unhappiness as it does happiness. Modern unhappiness. The unhappiness that comes from wanting what you don’t need and not feeling satisfied with all your needs actually being met (first world problems). The unhappiness that comes from having all the cool and fun things we have, but then wanting the newer model that comes out six months later. The dizzy, headachey feeling you get from scrolling on your phone for an hour in your bed in the dark. The empty feeling you have from looking at Instagram images and wanting things you saw but then forgetting what you saw because you just looked at 100 images in 1 minute. The slightly dissatisfied feeling, off to the side of your mind, but noticeable enough, that results from being on Facebook for too long, reading opinions in the form of posts and discussions in the form of a series of comments and pictures upon pictures upon pictures of people and babies and pets. Cool, but also not cool.

Where we are in history, with the Internet and how it connects and disconnects us, is the place where the cloud of modern unhappiness hangs.

To feel sorry for ourselves about this wouldn’t get us anywhere, though. Anyone older than you would probably chide you and say, “You’re lucky to have all that you have. We didn’t have [this] when I was your age.” This is true. We are experiencing a new type of unhappiness, but all the people who lived and died before us had reasons to be unhappy, too. Disease, shorter life expectancies, world wars, outdoor washrooms, you know, there is a huge range of things.

There is a lot of talk nowadays about the young generation being entitled. They expect a lot without wanting to work for it, which anyone over 25 would scoff at. But you know, every generation must look at their kids and what they have and say to them, “When your dad and I were kids, we never had this.” We say to our kids things like, “Did you know that we had to drive to a video store, rent a movie, drive home, watch the movie, REWIND the movie, and return it, and all you have to do is pick what you want to watch from thousands of titles, from several databases on your TV and press play?” I remember my parents would say the same sort of thing to me, just one-generation-up sort of things like, “We had to go to the movie theatre to watch a movie!” And then you get into the generation before it talking about walking to school uphill both ways, barefoot in the snow.

You get the picture. Every parent will tell their kids they have it sooo good, and life is so much easier with so many more amenities than when they were kids. Doesn’t that mean that we are all a little entitled, compared to the generation before us? None of us realize how lucky we are to have what we have because we don’t realize how hard our parents had it? We take for granted what we have and expect it to be that way and heaven forbid your Wi-Fi cuts out on your back deck? We want what we don’t need and feel bad about our lives if they aren’t as good as some famous person we don’t even know, living in California, having followed her dream to design clothing for cats, and now we want her haircut and the hand towels she has in her kitchen? We are told we must follow our dreams instead of being told that if everyone had their dream job, society would collapse?

Every generation has faced different challenges to be unhappy about. Even though there are different things that can cause unhappiness, perhaps people have always been able to come back to the SAME THINGS to build happiness. Perhaps happiness is that simple.

If you think about happiness in the simplest way possible, what, at the very root, are the things that make us happy? Going back to Abraham Maslow's ideas, here are a few simple ways to feel happy:

·         Having food to eat/eating good food (sometimes in solitude, but a lot of the time with family, friends, at gatherings, holidays)

·         Loving others and being loved

·         Feeling safe, secure, cozy

·         Doing fun things (hobbies, vacation, parties, down time), doing what you love to do and are good at doing

·         For those who are religious, the fulfillment that comes from having a relationship with God

      These are a few. Perhaps you can think of more. 

      Whatever your age, we can find happiness in these things, or variations of these things:

Babies basically eat, sleep and are held and made to feel safe. Toddlers are happy when they are eating snacks, doing fun things, living securely and safely within boundaries. Teenagers hang out with friends and eat pizza; they need to feel like they belong. Eventually, parties transition from pop-and-chip movie parties to parties with beer that you don’t want your parents to know about to parties you host at the home you own to intimate dinner parties with delicious food. Either way, it’s all a variation of the happiness that comes from being with loved ones and enjoying food and drinks together.

Whatever your age, you probably feel happy when you can share a meal with family, go out for dinner with friends, are told you are loved, have a cozy bed to sleep in, and get to do fun things once in a while. Perhaps as we get older, our opportunity for happiness grows and gets more complex. For example, we want to be happy ourselves, but we also want our kids and other loved ones to be happy as well, which is just as much, if not more important than our own happiness. We can start throwing in more things like the happiness that comes from working hard to achieve something, or the happiness that comes from seeing our children grow up, or the happiness that comes from being a support for others and from feeling supported by others.

It would stand to reason, then, that if our capacity for happiness increases by growing and becoming more complex, that we would have more opportunities for happiness and be more happy. Why is it that so many people tend to feel more unhappy?

How can we be happy in the long term? How can we develop a habit of happiness? How do we combat our modern unhappiness?

Down to its very core, once you wipe away all the things that tell us they will make us happy but actually don’t, we really could be more happy. Did you eat today? Do you have food in your house that you can make tomorrow? Do you have any plans on the horizon? Did you do anything fun in the last few months, memories you can replay? Do you have a bed to sleep in tonight? Do you have people in your life whom you love, and love you? Do you have a cozy couch to watch TV on? Are your needs met?

These are just a few things, but really, if you boil it down to the basics, the same things that have made you happy all throughout your life, the same things that have made people happy all throughout the ages, then you probably have all the ingredients.

Bake a happy cake and eat it. IT WILL TASTE GOOD.

Think about your kids. Your parents. Your boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, sister, brother, friends. Think about what they have done for you. Think about what you can do for them.

If you don’t like a certain part of your life, don’t complain—change it or decide to accept it. Be realistic.

Be grounded in the day. Get out of the Internet; climb out of the dark hole and tell yourself what day it is and what you are doing in that moment. Find something to be happy about—find a positive thing. Take a moment to let yourself laugh or joke about something. Spend more time being you in person with other people also in person. Find joy in the everyday—you have chores to do, but you are able to do them. You have dinner to make, but you have good food to cook. You have work to do, but you have a job that is making you money. All these things seem so basic, but they are so much more than what so many people have.

We live in a very exciting time in history, and we are learning how to navigate the Internet and all the inadvertent collateral damage that comes from falling into it. We can do it. It’s our responsibility as people alive right now to assess the downfalls of new technology and develop ways to prevent it from hurting us. As adults, we can do what we want, I know, but we should also set boundaries for ourselves so we don’t self-destruct.

We will be subject to this new, modern unhappiness, but we can fight it and find the same, reliable happiness here, too—just like those before us did. 

Be the "You" Kind of Mother

As a parent, I love my children more than anything else in the world, and I want them to be safe, strong, happy and healthy.

I want to be a good mother. I love photos of mothers bathed in the warm, peaceful light of the golden hour, sitting in a field of wildflowers, holding their children affectionately while wearing a pretty floral dress. She has patience in abundance and loves to spend every possible moment caring for her children. That’s the kind of mother I dream of being.

Sometimes being a mother comes easily to me—like when the right thing to say leaves my mouth and my kids’ faces brighten and I know I said exactly what they needed to hear. I try and anticipate my children’s needs and meet them. I try to be patient and kind, to listen and play with them as much as I cook and prepare for them. I try and spend the time talking with them about the little things because as someone has said, the little things are the big things to them, and I want them to talk to me about the big things when they grow up.

As many as there are good motherhood moments, sometimes being a “good mom” feels like an elusive quality that I just can’t grasp. It floats away from me, and I’m left feeling impatient, snappy and frustrated, and we’re all out of joint and nothing goes the way it should. I feel like I’m a failure of a mother as often as I feel like I’m a good mother. I observe other mothers out in public, I talk with friends who are mothers, I am part of a family in which many are mothers. I read about them, I see them on TV and watch them in movies—these other mothers—and I see in them what I am not.

I often find myself wishing I was more like “other mothers. “ “Other mothers” are more patient, more kind. They have their tempers on a tight, strong leash while my temper’s leash seems to be composed of threads that unravel a lot. They don’t care about messes and embrace the adventures had in the midst of the chaos. They want nothing more than to make memories with their kids. They look lovingly at their child with the slightest air of displeasure when their kids spill an entire glass of orange juice, and then wipe it up with one fell swoop of Bounty, and they don’t chide the child to be more careful. They drop everything to answer their kids’ questions, never telling them to “wait a few minutes, please; I just need to finish sending a couple of important emails.” They have nothing to feel guilty about.

I started realizing that by idealizing all the good aspects of all the “good moms,” I was creating an archetype of the perfect mother, and distancing myself from her all the while. I could barely see her, that ideal mother, because she was so high up on a pedestal, her pretty shoes barely visible. I could barely see her, but I desperately strived to be her.

But I have also realized that every mother is not the same person. There are so many kinds of people with so many different childhoods, different life experiences, different personalities and different lives, different challenges, different strengths and weaknesses, different values and motivations, different family dynamics. Then, many of them become mothers. Just because they become mothers doesn’t mean they all left themselves behind and transformed into the same person: “good moms.” Yes, parents routinely “die to self” for the sake of their kids’ needs, but trust me, you’re still in there, and the truth about who you are will come out and be even more apparent when you have kids.

There are so many kinds of mothers because there are so many kinds of people.

We’re all different mothers, but it doesn’t mean there is only one combination of personality and life experience that comprises a “good mom.”

Many people say that their mom is the best mom in the world, but if you lined up all of those best moms in the world, you would see a row of vastly different people. If every mom is the best mom in the world, then no mom is the best mom in the world. This isn’t a bad thing; it’s a good thing. It means that every mother is what her kids need; every mother is an imperfect human with good days and bad days; every mother is trying to do what is best for their kids; every mother expresses their love for their children in different ways.

On this Mother’s Day, I want to encourage all the mothers out there to just be the “you” kind of mother. It’s what you were created to be, and every day, you are living out the best kind of mother for your kids. God knew all this when He created you and created your children. Happy Mother’s Day, and much love to you!

A Break in the Clouds

I had a dream years ago that Joel and I were driving in a car on the highway. Suddenly and systematically, dark clouds gathered, becoming one huge cloud, and rain began to pour down. We couldn’t see anything. I remember panicking, thinking, “We are driving really fast, but we can’t see where we are going!”

I was afraid and helpless. But just as that thought materialized, I noticed a small break in the clouds up ahead. It was further ahead, not right in front of us, and it allowed us to see that the road was going to bend up ahead. The road was elevated and there were trees on either side, so that if we hadn’t seen this bend, we could have driven off the road and fallen down a forested cliff. That small break in the clouds was all we needed to steer and drive through this blinding storm.

The dream awakened me with a jolt, and I have often wondered what it meant.

If our lives are a highway (and we’re going to drive it all night long), and we can’t see the future or where we will end up, all we really need is a small glimpse in the distance to keep us on track. It’s all we need.

I sometimes feel that I’ve come to the point in my life where I need to steer. Do you know what I mean? As teenagers and young adults, life happens and you can make not-so-great decisions in the name of naïveté or simply not needing to accomplish specifics yet.  You have your whole life ahead of you; you have years and years to live and react to circumstances and have fun and make mistakes. But eventually you find yourself in this middle stage, where you’ve done all of that, which is completely OK, but if you actually want to accomplish certain things, you need to start focusing on specifics. You need to steer in one direction or another. You can still “dream,” but it’s harder to “do.”

To anyone who has found themselves wondering in desperation, 

“What should I do? Who should I be? Why am I here? What should I focus on? What should I let go of? I’m driving, but I can’t see, and I don’t know where I am going or where I’m supposed to go!” 

 just know that while we don’t know what is going to happen on the other side of this moment, God will always show you enough so that you can steer in the right direction. There will always be a glimpse available to you to help you make the right decisions for you and your family. This glimpse or break in the clouds could be anything from a passion that lights you up, a sense of urgency for something that you can’t shake, a dream that gives you a sense of purpose, a goal that resonates in your soul, a thought that breaks your concentration, a sign that keeps popping up. It might be a person that enters or re-enters your life, an idea that glows inside you like a lightbulb and won’t be extinguished, a reminder of something you notice when looking at an old photo. The glimpse might become clear while you are alone, deep in thought, in prayer, or in conversation. It might be something your kid says or do, or something the grocery store cashier says, or something you observe. 

Once you see that glimpse, all the fear and panicky feelings will fall away. That break in the clouds will give you a feeling of peace and purpose. 

Keep moving, keep living and breathing, keep driving. You will always get to where you need to go. Believe that there will always be a break in the clouds, especially during the storms that seem to blind you. It’s all you need.

Little Changes, Big Changes

A couple of years ago, I started seeing an osteopath to help with my scoliosis. It changed my life. He helped to align and balance my body as much as possible, and it honestly feels like I am walking on a cloud when I leave. BUT I’M STILL ON THE GROUND.

Anyway, the manipulations he makes are very small. In fact, he generally has to go by feel because the problem isn’t always visible to the naked eye. Just a small tweak here, a series of movements there, and I’m on my way, on my invisible cloud. The same goes for chiropractors and their adjustments. They make minor adjustments to your spine, and all of a sudden, your whole body feels completely different.

Here’s another example of a small tweak in our life that yielded a significant difference:

Emmett was not progressing with reading as fast as what his teacher wanted to see last year. I asked his teacher for a second home reading book, so we had two books on the go at home instead of one. This added another 5-10 minutes of reading every day, which I found to be quite minor—a minor adjustment—but the results were major. Emmett read literally double the number of books he would have read with just one at home, and he progressed much more quickly, and reading is no longer an issue. That small tweak made a world of difference.

You don’t have to experience a massive upheaval or do things completely differently in order to experience a significant change in your life. Sometimes those sorts of upheavals need to happen to get the change you need, but not always. 

This has changed my way of thinking about change. I’ve always been big on big changes. Maybe this is because I love the excitement, the new sense of opportunity and the bright light that comes with the idea of a big change. However, you can still promote significant change in your life without major life events happening by tweaking this here, and that there. Switch from one thing to another if something isn’t working. Add 10 minutes of something here, or subtract 10 minutes of something there. Eat this instead of that. Change your hand cream. Drink another glass of water. Tweak the way you view yourself in the world. Tweak the type of person you want to be—a mindset, a perception, the stopping or starting of a habit. When you read something that resonates with you, repeat it or remind yourself of it, and it will change you.

Honestly, sometimes if you let yourself think a little smaller—a little simpler—the answer for things that cause frustration, or aren't working, or take up too much of your time, are staring you right in the face. The causes of misalignment—the notes that are out of tune—are often corrected by a small adjustment, not major surgery. You can change your life for the better, a little bit at a time.

As Dr. Seuss is quoted as saying, “Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.” I love that quote so much that it’s hanging on my living room wall.