All You Need to Know in Life – You Learned in Kindergarten

By Shlomo Maital  

       “ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW about how to live and what to do and how to be I learned in kindergarten.”   This is an old book by Robert Fulghum.  Rabbi Elisha Wolfin, rabbi of our Conservative (Masorti) congregation Ve’ahavta, referred to it in his weekly drasha (sermon).    Here is the list.

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.

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.”

  Hey – do we really need to know more than this?   Fulghum adds:  “Take any one 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 we 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 as a basic policy to always put things back where they found them and to clean up their own mess.”

     We have four kids.  They are all grown, with their own kids.  I remember bringing them to kindergarten – and wishing, truly, that I could stay and play.  Cookies and milk at 3 pm each afternoon.  Wow…

       What could be better?