I recently stumbled across an old paperback that had been tucked away in a box for more than forty years: “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” by Robert Fulghum. The yellowed pages took me straight back to 1986—the year I graduated from high school and started college. I wondered if the book would still resonate after all these years. It did.
Fulghum’s book isn’t really about kindergarten. It’s about the simple rules that make life work—rules we learned before we could spell our names, before we cared what anyone thought of us, and before life became so wonderfully complicated. Things like share everything, play fair, don’t hit people, say you’re sorry when you hurt somebody, and put things back where you found them.
They’re simple enough for a five-year-old to understand, yet somehow difficult for grown adults to practice. Somewhere along the way, we didn’t outgrow those lessons—we simply buried them beneath busier lives.
We need to go back in time. Before we learned that nobody ever uses white crayons. Before we learned that black jellybeans were “poisonous.” Before Dad’s old shirt became a painting smock. Before we were too embarrassed to sing or dance in public. (Ask a group of kindergarteners, “Who wants to dance?” Every hand in the room shoots up.) Life moved more slowly then. Every day felt like an adventure. We couldn’t wait to get to school, and we couldn’t wait to go back tomorrow. If you grew up in Atlanta, you went to Mathis Dairy in kindergarten. And, more importantly, you milked Rosebud—a real, live cow. After the milking, they handed out cold chocolate milk in little glass bottles with paper straws. It was a rite of passage. The simplicity of milking a cow. The joy of a cold bottle of chocolate milk.
We’d be wise to start over—to live life like a kindergartner. To learn something new every day. To draw and paint. To sing and dance. To take a nap. To clean up our own messes—not just the ones on the floor, but careless words and unnecessary arguments. Personally, I still believe warm cookies and cold milk solve more problems than we give them credit for. Maybe we should send some warm Snickerdoodles and cold 2 percent to Tehran.
Fulghum reminds us to be aware of wonder. Like planting that tiny seed in a Styrofoam cup. The roots disappeared into the soil while the little green shoots reached toward the sun. Nobody really knew how it worked. It just did. Maybe that’s true of life, too. It’s astonishing, fragile, and far shorter than we imagine. We spend so much time chasing things that we overlook the miracles in front of us—a beautiful sunrise, a full moon, the laughter of a child, or a conversation with an old friend. To children, life and death still matter. They haven’t learned to rush past either one. Perhaps that’s a lesson we’ve forgotten. When my daughter was in kindergarten, Templeton, the classroom rat, died. I’m not sure why they had a rat in the classroom, but those were dark days at our house. She cried harder over that little rat than many adults cry over things that matter far more.
Fulghum reminds us of the first big word we ever learned: look. Maybe that’s still the best advice we’ll ever receive. Look at the people around you. Look at the beauty you’ve stopped noticing. Look at the life you’ve been given. Be grateful. The kindergarten rules were never really about children. They were the keys to a better life: share, be kind, say you’re sorry, hold hands, stick together and never lose your sense of wonder.
Because in the end, those simple rules may still be the only instruction book we ever need for a happy life.
