This has to be one of my all time favorite pieces of literature, sure it may not be Hemingway or Shakespeare, but I like the way Robert Fulgum thinks.

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 university mountain, but there in the sand-pit at kindergarten. These arethe 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 are sorry when you hurt somebody.
• Wash your hands before you eat.
• Flush the toilet.
• Warn cookies and milk are good for you.
• Live a balanced live - learn a little and think a little and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day a little.
• 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 yoghourt carton: The roots go down an the plant goes up and nobody really knows how or why, but we are all like that.
• Cats and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the yoghourt carton - they all die. So do we.
• And then remember your first reading book and the first word you learned - the biggest of all - LOOK.

Everything you need to know is in there somewhere. The Golden Rule and love and basic sanition. Ecology and politics and equality and sane living.

Take one of these 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 we all - the whole world - had cookies and milk at three o'clock every afternoon and then lay down with our blankets 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.

Copyright © 1986, 1988 by Robert Fulghum.

Heaven's Gate