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 sand pile at 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 in 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 one of those items and extrapolate it into sophisticated adult terms and apply it to your family life or your work or government or your world and it holds true and clear and firm. Think what a better world it would be if we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk at about 3 o'clock in the afternoon and then lay down with our blankies for a nap. Or if all governments had as 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 in the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.
[Source: "ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN" by Robert Fulghum.]
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3 comments:
Pfft. Sharing is immoral. Sharing is something parents and teachers created to make kids give their stuff away when they don't want to. In real life, voluntary actions are not called sharing. They're called giving, lending, borrowing, etc.
Other stuff in that list may be a bit dodgy, too.
Sharing is equivalent to lending. You are simply putting a negative connotation upon the word. By the way, giving is equivalent to donating; you don't expect to get it back and you pass ownership to another person. Giving is not sharing or lending.
Sharing: the joint use of a resource. It figures prominently in gift economies, but also can play a significant role in market economies, for example in car sharing.
Lending: disposing of money or property with the expectation that the same thing (or an equivalent) will be returned.
Both are letting someone use something with the expectation that it will be returned. I can share my book with you, but I expect that I will get it back. The same is true of lending.
However, there is one difference. Sharing is more when two people use something at the same time, where as lending is one person using it, and then it switching hands.
Essentially, there is no difference between the two terms. You are simply letting your own bias on the term "share" get in the way of the message. It's the same as not listening to your cooking teacher because he says toe-may-toe as toe-mat-toe.
We must all strive to look beyond our silly limitations that we impose upon ourselves, and observe them for they are truly are: silly limits. Racism is no different. Many of the world's problems could be solved if we didn't have these little problems. So step up! Go beyond your ignorance! And I need a cookie! (Anticlimaxes rock!)
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