I don’t know why in the last week or two this book I would have read about 10 odd years ago popped back into my head. But it did.
I post it here, not to take away from it’s entirety in the book, but to give a small pause for reflection. Why the complex and cryptic messages of wise sages, why the difficult paths to salvation?
We see so many people now able to share their angst about current situations around the globe, concern with lack of leadership in our governments, fear based policies and the hate that resides.
Step back and reflect what life in your world might be like if you live by these few short rules. Not sometimes, all the time. I think it might be time to introduce cookies and milk at work
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by Robert Fulghum
– an excerpt from the book, All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten
All I really need to know I learned in kindergarten. ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten. Wisdom was not at the top of the graduate-school mountain, but there in the sandpile at Sunday School. These are the things I learned:
- Share everything.
- Play fair.
- Don’t hit people.
- Put things back where you found them.
- Clean up your own mess.
- Don’t take things that aren’t yours.
- Say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody.
- Wash your hands before you eat.
- Flush.
- Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
- Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and playand work every day some.
- Take a nap every afternoon.
- When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
- Be aware of wonder.
- Remember the little seed in the styrofoam cup:The roots go down and the plant goes up and nobodyreally knows how or why, but we are all like that.
- Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup –
they all die. So do we.
- And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.
Everything you need to know is in there somewhere.
- The Golden Rule and love and basic sanitation.
- Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.
Take any of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or your government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm.
Think what a better world it would be if all – the whole world – had cookies and milk about three o’clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap.
Or if all governments had a basic policy to always put thing back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.
And it is still true, no matter how old you are – when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.
© Robert Fulghum, 1990.
Found in Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, Villard Books: New York, 1990, page 6-7.
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I can’t find much wrong here. I wonder… what would our days be like. how simple would things be. Would this be the only rules we needed?
Well that’s what ireckon anyway
