Lost knowledge of Kindergarten

"All I really need to know I learned in Kindergarten" -Robert Fulghum

Do we remember what we learned in Kindergarten? Have we ever wondered if we apply at least one basic knowledge we gained in our childhood to the real world today, how much change we can bring to the world or even in our everyday life?

Today I was in an Effective Business Writing class where an example of the effective writing had a bullets of what we learned in Kindergarten. Reading those bullets made me realize that as we grow up we tend to lose our basic knowledge or we forget to apply that basic knowledge in our daily lives. Here are few bullets that I thought can actually make this world and our lives much better.

Play Fair: It means exactly what it says, don’t be selfish, and be fair to others. How fair do we really play in our lives today? When we were kids, we were taught that it is not good to hurt, lie or cheat people just for our own benefits, that’s not fair. As we grow up, the same concept does apply to our own lives, yet we see so many deceitful people at our workplace, business, friendship, love and so on. Everyone has big goals or dreams that they would like to achieve as soon as possible. In order to achieve our goals or fulfill our dreams, we walk on a path where we meet several different people that help us to reach our destination. Playing fair in this case is to recognize and appreciate people who help us and be fair to them when they take out time from their busy schedule and help you in order for you to achieve your goals and dreams, don’t just use them for your own benefits. We become so blind and selfish that to achieve our goal or fulfill our dreams, we try to pull down other people or create huddles in their path to eliminate the number of competitors with similar goal. What are we going to achieve by doing such act? It just proves how weak we are, it shows we don’t trust our own abilities in facing the competition. Instead, play fair by facing the challenge. Challenges are meant to motivate you to not give up and keep on walking on the path that leads you towards your goal or dreams. Develop yourself and focus on your own goals and dreams instead of making dirty plans on how to ruin other people’s life.

Clean your own mess: I commute every day in the public transportation from Queens, New York to Jersey City, NJ for work. Apart from dust, there is always so much mess around in the trains, subways and streets. Coffee cups, paper bags, free newspapers and so many other things laying around creating more and more garbage and unhealthy environment. What happened to Kindergarten teachings of cleaning after your mess? After having that much needed morning coffee, we just leave the cup under the train seat. After finishing that bagel or donut, or any food we tend to leave that empty yet dirty paper bags in that corner of the train when no one is looking or just throw them on the streets. Do we realize that we are polluting our own surrounding, our own environment in which we live? We always want to be so clean and free of germs, which is why we are always washing our hands, using sanitizer and so on. Keeping just yourself clean is not going to keep you away from germs as we all know how important it is to keep our environment clean, taught in our school. Furthermore, we teach our kids to keep our house clean. Whatever toys they take out from the boxes, they need to put it back. They should sit in one place and finish their food, so that they do not make mess around the house. We want to keep our house clean and whoever makes the mess, we make sure that person clean it up so that they learn the ethics of cleanliness. We may have forgotten what we learned in Kindergarten, but can we, ourselves apply the ethics of cleanliness that we teach our kids in the real world? Imagine if everyone were to be more careful in disposing their trash instead of throwing them on the trains, subways and even on streets, our environment, our surroundings would be so clean and free of germs. Lastly, our surrounding has a lot of effect on our thoughts. It is hard to have clear and good thoughts when our surrounding is dirty and smelly as our mind tends to lean more towards the surrounding since that’s what we see even before anything else comes to our mind.

Say sorry when you hurt someone: We were taught in Kindergarten that if we hurt someone intentionally or unintentionally we should say sorry as a courtesy; which we did follow when we were a kid. It is sad that our ego grew with our age.  In our ego, we tend to forget that everyone is different and everyone’s mental level is different. No one is right or wrong. We may not be hurt by a word or a sentence that your friend would be. Our egos have grown so much that we would lose relationships yet we would refrain from saying just one word “Sorry” only because per our mental level that word or sentence is not something one should be hurt. When we weigh our ego more, we only show the sign of our weakness as we can’t face the consequence of hurting the other person intentionally or unintentionally that was created by us. If we know we have hurt someone, then saying sorry can change the entire picture. It will show how strong we are to take the responsibility of what we may have said or what we may have done and it also shows our concern towards that person which would actually maintain our relationship and may even take a better shape. Ego can take away that precious gift from us for life what a one simple word “Sorry” can save.

Take a nap in the afternoon: Now I know what you are thinking, we are so busy in our daily lives that we hardly get any good night sleep, there is no point in talking about taking a nap. No matter if it’s Monday or Friday, we are always tired; why? Because we have so much to do that we don’t stop, we keep on hopping from one task to another, sleep late at night and wake up early for work or school. While we are continuously working on different task, often we find ourselves making mistakes; Why? Because once again, we are tired. There is a limit on how much our body can endure and how much our brain can process. Stop! Relax! It is not the end of the world! We should give ourselves a break. After each task, sit on a chair with eyes closed for only 5 mins. as if you are meditating; clear the brain from the previous task and prepare ourselves to begin the next task. Trust me, 5 mins is not going to make much difference to anyone else but it will be much more beneficial to us. Taking a nap in the afternoon is what we were told to do in the Kindergarten, but taking small naps during the day after accomplishing a task in the busy world today will relax our body keeping us healthy, it will refresh our mind and will also give us more energy to perform better for the rest of the day.

When you go out in the world watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together: In Kindergarten, we were asked to watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together when we went out on the streets because we were kids. This is what we should still be doing as an adult. I can relate this back to our first topic, play fair. There are so many people in this world ready to take over what we have, making dirty plans to keep us away from the competition. This is a world full of deceitful people which is why it is important to look out for such people and start recognizing our true friends and loved ones, don’t let them go because in today’s world we don’t find such people every day. There are times when we tend to believe in people with fake personality and ignore our well-wisher. We are all born with instincts. When we talk to people, we shouldn’t just keep our eyes, ears and mouth open, but also try to feel the vibes as we won’t feel positive vibes from everyone in this world but only from those who has a good spirit. We should try to listen to what our intuition has to say as our inner voice is our own soul and no other person in this world can tell us what and how our own soul feels. When we go out in this world we should watch out for the traffic, deceivers; hold hands and stick together for who is our true loved ones and our well-wisher.

The creator has made earth the most beautiful place to live in this universe, let’s not ruin it by our selfishness, messiness, deceitfulness, getting lost in the busy world, ego and ignoring our own instincts and loosing well-wishers. Let’s be challenging and play fair to achieve our goal, keep the environment and our surroundings clean, say sorry if we hurt someone intentionally or unintentionally and don’t let our ego ruin our relationships. It is important to keep ourselves healthy if we want to achieve our next task, so let’s relax and take small naps, and last but not the least we should always listen to our intuition so that we don’t lose our well-wishers as we won’t be able to find them in this world again.