I remember a minor unfortunate event last week when I, my sister, and my mother went to the DFA to had our passports renewed. We were already nearing the end of the process, at the data encoding and signature queue. The line wasn’t that long, and it moved every now and then…so it was not a line na nakaka-init ng ulo.

Anyway, at one point, when the line was moving already [we had chairs], there was this lady who cut in the line in front of my sister, who was in front of me and my mother. So unfortunate of this lady because one of my sister’s [and my, come to think of it] pet peeves is people cutting in line. So my sister told this lady, “Miss dun po yung end ng line,”  pointing to where the lady should be. The lady looked at her as if to say “I don’t care” and stayed on her spot. Our instant reaction was irritation. How dare her! However, we decided that the stress was not worth it and we just let her be, but not without the parinig on the side.

Because of this incident, I remembered the book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum. How ironic that we forget the most basic lessons we learned when we were young, when our parents taught us simple, good values! These lessons were so simple and yet we seem to have a hard time following them!

So as a reminder, I am posting the most basic lessons here, as per the book:

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.

AND FALL IN LINE!