Pensamientos

The following excerpt is from Robert Fulgum's wise little book about the things he learned in kindergarden. I believe there is way to conduct our lives that makes us saner, happier and more stable. My precious girlfriend reminds me daily that I have too many rules for living and that I set too many boundaries. Simply I'm more at ease and more stable when my life has a clear direction. I'm a poet, accustomed to chaos, and I constantly strive to create order and give shape to what I imagine. Always, I seek for the things I need to know, because they are somewhere. Here is the crux of fulgum's ideas: "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 thing 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. 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 Sunday School. These are the things I learned: 1 Share everything. 2 Play fair. 3 Don't hit people. 4 Put things back where you found them. 5 Clean up your own mess. 6 Don't take things that aren't yours. 7 Say you're sorry when you hurt somebody. 8 Wash your hands before you eat. 9 Flush. 10 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. 11 Take a nap every afternoon. 12 When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together. 13 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."