Simple Solutions

Life, as a teacher, tends to offer a plethora of lessons. And most of those, I find, are quite similar.

Life is hard. Life is complicated. Life ain’t straightforward. Life is messy, and chaotic. Painful and unfair and anything but under your control.

Sometimes, though – you start to realize that life might not be the best teacher. Or one that even knows anything at all.

It’s like our school system, right?

We’re brought up to go to a school and obey teachers whose only proven claim to teaching is the fact that they made it to a diploma by suffering through a different schoolsystem.

Not because they have actual knowledge. Or a passion for teaching. Or because they offer the actual wisdom we’re taught to expect from them.

Hell. Seriously, half of the time they barely even know the subject they’re teaching cause they ‘just took the job cause it was available’ and ‘this was the only subject they needed a teacher for’.

You know, like the dude from Glee that became a Spanish teacher without ever taking a single class, even though his passion was music and he didn’t know a single thing about teaching (or, again, Spanish). Not exactly someone you should want to be taught by. Or learn from.

So. That’s what kinda teacher life is. One we’re forced from a young age to listen to. One that teaches us lessons and patterns and answers that we take for truth, without question. But one that doesn’t necessarily actually know a damn thing on the subject.

And what I’ve come to find out more and more…is that I’m way better off skipping lifes classes and hitting the books myself to find my own answers. Because sure, life MAY be hard, as we are taught – but it doesn’t always have to be. Sometimes solutions are simple.

Like me not sleeping through the entire night. I’ve seen doctors. Had tests. Took pills and tried home remedies, music, different matresses and all kinds of bedding. To no avail – nights were me getting up ten times with back pains and nightmares and and and.

Turns out the solution for the past week has been seemingly simple: Stop drinking two hours before sleeping, instead of gulping down half a litre of water before bed.

Et voila. No more waking up. Save the backpain (still there) till morning. No more nightmares cause I’m sleeping deeper since I’m not constantly on the verge of my body having to wake me for a toilet break. And, obviously, no more actual toilet breaks.

I see it when I approach any problem. Especially in games like Layton and Zelda etc that encourage thinking complicated and out of the box: I consider the outliers first. Try the tough solutions before the obvious answers. Make things hard before trying simple.

But life doesn’t always get it right. Things don’t have to be hard. Sometimes the solution is simple.