“These are the things I learned (in Kindergarten):
- 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 drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work everyday 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 hamster 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 worked you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK.”
Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten
Dear Don and Peter:
I have found the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri to be disturbing and sad as they once again remind me that people rarely take the time to really listen to one another and show empathy for someone they are predisposed to distrust or fear. Similar personal sadness was generated by the shootings at Newtown or, more recently, Marysville-Pilchuck. These all-too-human failures to listen can be tiny or great: can be as simple as hurting another person’s feelings inadvertently due to a failure to hear what was sought as opposed to what was said; can have enormous consequences on a human scale such as those that result from the genocides or religious wars in which our species all too frequently engages.
I wanted to use the occasion of this piece to talk to you about things I have learned in the course of a long life; to tell you how powerful it has been for me to speak and listen to people from different cultures with differing goals from the one in which I was raised in the 1950s. But as I pondered the possibility of doing so, I concluded that I would be guilty of preaching – thereby closing off what was intended to be the basis for a healthy discussion.
There are experiences I have had which have taught me much about the ways of the world, imparting life lessons so profound as to constitute an epiphany. At their core, each of these experiences proved the rightness of the simpler truths that ought to govern human relationships rather than the flawed logic of complexity that we often use to avoid being reminded of the obligations these simpler truths demand of us. But they happened to me – not you – and to offer them will likely evoke anything from boredom to active hostility of the “there he goes again” variety. Such is the fate of anyone inclined to tell stories, especially stories with a message.
It is not in the ways of the world that you should believe me about the truth of my own epiphanies. As did I, you prefer to learn from experience. This is true of each member of each generation, and this tendency is at the heart of much that is wrong in human society. If we had the luxury of a shared human experiential memory into which everyone could tap, perhaps much evil could be averted: perhaps a shared memory of the pain of the Holocaust could prevent atrocities from bullying to segregation to genocide; perhaps a shared memory of the beauty of a more primitive earth and the process by which we have defiled it could prevent our continuing efforts to destabilize the very planet upon which we depend for our survival as a species; perhaps a shared memory of what it means to be lonely would remind all of us to be gracious and thoughtful to one another at all times.
But it isn’t your fault that you have such a preference; it is a fault of our species. Since each person is locked within his or her own mind and must learn from personal experience, each generation is prone to repeat the harmful behaviors human nature seems to demand and thereby experience the ill effects that consistently result from them: wars, bias, discrimination, fear, religious intolerance, and so on – and on. At the heart of this failure to respect the lessons of history lies the fact of our mental isolation from one another. We cannot read minds and are left to share by less effective means of communication. Speaking and writing require effective listening and discerning reading, and the more fear we have of the speaker, the speaker’s state of being, or the motives we ascribe to the speaker, the less likely we are to do either very well.
Should it seem that I am trying to burden you with guilt, be assured that I am not. I was, and am, guilty of the same thing after all, and am aware that burdening others with guilt has never worked well over the long haul – not with me nor anyone else I know. I am simply reciting facts, and what you do or don’t do with them is up to you. I have faith in what I preach, even if you yet have no referent by which to value some of it. Perhaps you will come to understand my dilemma better as you have children and they grow and prefer to depend upon their own experience in preference to lessons hard-won by you in the course of time.
So, for now, I am simply satisfied to urge you on your way, to advise you to choose the paths you travel with care, and to remind you of your mother’s belief in the truth of Robert Fulghum’s words. Since your mother and I are only human and not gods, we must depend upon you to decide which whispers from our hearts you will or will not accept.
With grateful thanks for your existence, love
Dad
