I believe in one core philosophy: mac and cheese. I can learn everything I need to know from mac and cheese, and I believe that mac and cheese holds in its macaroni shells and melted, cheesy grasp the secrets to life.

The weird thing about my relationship with mac and cheese is that I’m lactose intolerant, but I couldn’t help but crave the forbidden fruit after hearing my sisters rave about its delicious taste. So I did what any curious 7 year old would and ate some, immediately throwing up sometime afterwards. My mom knew I wanted to have mac and cheese, so she just put butter instead of cheese whenever I asked her for some. We accurately named it “macaroni without cheese” but it became normal to have a section of the mac that was cheese-free. Just as easy as it was for my mom to replace cheese with butter, life is the same way. If you don’t like something, take it out and replace it with something else. Since there is so much to learn from mac and cheese, I’ve distilled the teachings into three main groups: ingredients for a tasty and appetizing mac, putting together the right things for the perfect mac proportions, and knowing when to take the mac out of the oven.

The ingredients are the most essential part in your mac. If they aren’t what you want, then even if the mac is cooked to perfection you still won’t like the end result. Pick your ingredients based on the things you enjoy, even if they don’t seem like they’d work for mac and cheese. This applies to your mac and your life. If there's something you'd wish to change about your life, I don't see any point in trying to make it more complicated than mac and cheese. If you want to change something don't bother complicating it, just change it. If things in your life are like how cheese is in my macaroni, then, like my mom did, we should both replace it with something else.

The next step is: putting the right things together. Now that you have all of your ingredients, it's time to put them in the right order and to measure out how much of each you want: measure out the cheese, how much macaroni, etc. To take this and apply it to our lives would be the equivalent of scheduling. Schedules help us balance our time and decide how much of it we want to spend on certain things. We should all have fun activities in our “diet” but those activities can't make up the whole thing.  It's important in mac and cheese and our lives to balance out what activities we do and how much time we spend doing them.

The final thing is to keep a timer on you and decide how long you going to be baking your mac and cheese.  You can't let it burn, but you can't eat it raw either; how long you put your macaroni can either be calculated or a gut feeling, but you have to have something to tell you when to take it out. In reality, baking the mac and cheese would be having a good sense of self. If you're not paying attention to your macaroni, it can burn,  the same goes for your life. If you're not aware of the emotions you're feeling, your physical health or mental health, social health, etc then you can unknowingly ruin yourself, just by not paying attention and being aware. Treat yourself like you’re that delicious macaroni-and-whatever in the oven: pay attention and don't let yourself burn.

As you take the macaroni out of the oven smell the fruits of your labor; your macaroni and your life should now be exactly as you want it.