Simple questions should have simple answers, but they rarely do.
- A five-year-old will ask his parents where babies come from.
Kids that age won’t understand how too much champagne on New Year’s Eve resulted in their September birthday. Instead, we lie to them with stories about storks and cabbage patches. Another simple question is, “Why are there four seasons?”. With the internet and YouTube, kids will not be satisfied with a simple, “Because that’s the way it is” or some answer about divine powers. Explaining how the tilt of the Earth’s axis and its yearly journey around the Sun can get quite complex. Adults also ask simple questions. I ask my wife, “How much did you pay for that?” regularly. A wife may have some simple questions of her own like, “Where were you until 1:00 a.m. Saturday and why do you reek of smoke and cheap perfume?” My wife and I recently asked each other the same simple question when we saw our energy bills skyrocketing during the pandemic lockdown. The whole family was home all the time and our HVAC system ran constantly. We asked ourselves, “Do we truly need our HVAC system?” We obviously need the furnace to run in winter, but we can set the thermostat low and depend on heavier clothing and blankets to keep us warm. In the hot summer with no HVAC, our moods would surely change for the worse when the temperature outside climbed to over 90 F. We also knew that by changing filters often and having an HVAC professional inspect and clean out HVAC in the spring and fall, that we could lower our energy bills. That one simple question about our need for HVAC has a simple one-word answer. And that is, “Yes”.