All I really need to know...

Today as I was outside making bubbles and watching them float across the yard, I remembered how such simple things could bring such pleasure. If I hadn't had other responsibilities I think I would have sat on the porch all day making bubbles.

This evening after dinner I pulled some ready made Toll House chocolate cookie dough out of the refrigerator and made cookies. Did my son eat the cookies? No. Just me. As I sat doing my accounting homework, I ate chocolate chip cookies and realized the stress I normally feel during this time was gone. Alas, I believe eating Toll House cookies improves brain power and information processing.

Both of these activities reminded me of simpler times and a poster I had on my wall as a teenager of Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need to KNOW I Learned In Kindergarten.

I thought I would share some of it here and encourage you to check out his website. His insights into the world are truly inspirational. http://robertfulghum.com/

All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten 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 play and 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 nobody really 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 things 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.

Excerpt found at http://www.kalimunro.com/learned_in_kindergarten.html