Sometimes as adults we forget what we learned as kids. We make up our own rules and forget the basics we were taught in school.
I recently had to attend a weekly meeting at my job. I work in a big hospital department, and we need these weekly meetings to be able to get out information to the whole group at once. This particular meeting was about how to get along with each other. The meeting was definitely needed, but it was so hard, at least for me, to attend. The fact that grown adults need to be taught how to get along disturbs me to the quantum level (I love quantum physics) of my very existence and any alternate realities that I may exist in. Here is how I would do the meeting.
I would like to thank everyone for coming to our meeting today. This meeting is embarrassingly titled, ” How to get along with other adults”. I have brought in a guest speaker for this event. Please welcome the best-selling author of eight books and a spoken word Grammy nominee, Mr. Robert Fulghum. The floor is yours Mr. Fulghum.
Thank you, thank you very much Mr. Harvey. Good morning everyone. This won’t take very long. Here it is in its simplest form.
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.
Thank you very much for having me. I brought cookies and milk, please share them with everyone. Have a good day.
And that ladies and gentleman is: The Bembreneth Way.
The Bembreneth Way 