Frame every so-called disaster with these words: In five years, will this matter?

It takes tough love to order kids to step away from the iPhone or iPad during dinner or to take the devices away if they're interrupting and interfering with everyone else's pleasure at a movie, concert or other public event.

Choice, not chance, determines your destiny. It's up to you to decide what you are worth, how you matter, and how you make meaning in the world. No one else has your gifts--your set of talents, ideas, interests. You are an original. A masterpiece.

We all have a personal pool of quicksand inside us where we begin to sink and need friends and family to find us and remind us of all the good that has been and will be.

Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.

Growing old beats the alternative - dying young.

Life isn't tied with a bow, but it's still a gift.