Oh, the Places You'll Grow

You have brains in your head. You have shoes on your feet. You can steer yourself any direction you meet. But here's what the Doctor forgot to explain: some directions are boring and some are insane and some are just left turns you take in the rain because your GPS died and you're lost in Des Moines and sometimes that's when the adventure begins. Dr. Seuss knew something the rest of us are still learning: the best truths fit inside the simplest words. One fish, two fish. That's counting. Red fish, blue fish. That's categorizing. Put them together and you've taught a child the architecture of the observable world in twelve syllables. He drew a cat who showed up uninvited with chaos in a box and taught us that fun is only fun if it frightens you a little. He put a Grinch on a mountain and proved that a heart can grow— that cruelty is often just loneliness wearing a costume. He said: "A person's a person no matter how small." And that line has done more work than most constitutions. They were children's books. Except they weren't. They were philosophy disguised as nonsense, wisdom hiding in rhyme, the truth wearing a tall striped hat so you'd let it through the door. You have brains in your head. You have shoes on your feet. But the places you'll go matter less than the growing you do on the way.