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Books that have changed my thinking (6): All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, by Robert Fulghum

Story: That’s Not My Problem

A mouse looked through a crack in the wall to see the farmer and his wife opening a package; what food might it contain?
He was aghast to discover that it was a mouse trap!
Retreating to the farmyard, the mouse proclaimed the warning, “There is a mouse trap in the house, there is a mouse trap in the house.”
The chicken clucked and scratched, raised her head and said, “Mr. Mouse, I can tell you this is a grave concern to you, but it is of no consequence to me; I cannot be bothered by it.”
The mouse turned to the pig and told him, “There is a mouse trap in the house.”
“I am so very sorry Mr. Mouse,” sympathized the pig, “but there is nothing I can do about it but pray; be assured that you are in my prayers.”
The mouse turned to the cow, who replied, “Like wow, Mr. Mouse, a mouse trap; am I in grave danger, Duh?”
So the mouse returned to the house, head down and dejected to face the farmer’s mouse trap alone.
That very night a sound was heard throughout the house, like the sound of a mouse trap catching its prey. The farmer’s wife rushed to see what was caught.
In the darkness, she did not see that it was a venomous snake whose tail the trap had caught.
The snake bit the farmer’s wife.
The farmer rushed her to the hospital.
She returned home with a fever. Now everyone knows you treat a fever with fresh chicken soup, so the farmer took his hatchet to the farmyard for the soup’s main ingredient.
His wife’s sickness continued so that friends and neighbours came to sit with her around the clock. To feed them, the farmer butchered the pig.
The farmer’s wife did not get well, in fact, she died, and so many people came for her funeral the farmer had the cow slaughtered to provide meat for all of them to eat.
So the next time you hear that someone is facing a problem and think that it does not concern you, remember that when the least of us is threatened, we are all at risk.

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When Morag’s nephew Cameron was born in 1989 I had just started taking services, and the family decided that we should celebrate the birth with a baptism ceremony in the Wakefield church. I’d never done a baptism before and so I went over the top a bit, devoting the whole of one Sunday service to the task, complete with readings, music, and sermon on the Unitarian view of baptism (or, rather Bill Darlison’s view of baptism). Cameron’s father Steve had recently attended an in-service training course at which the lecturer had read aloud the passage from Robert Fulghum which we heard earlier. Steve had a photocopy, and said he would like to read it at his son’s christening.

We were all impressed by the sentiments and a number of people commented that Steve’s reading had been the high spot of the ceremony. Mary, Cameron’s mother, determined to find out more about the author and bought the book which contained the essay. She passed the book on to me. Only then did I discover that Robert Fulghum was a Unitarian Universalist minister. On the flyleaf I read that he was born in Waco, Texas, in 1937, and has several academic degrees but considers them less important than the education life has given him. He’s worked as a singing cowboy and rode in rodeos. He’s been an IBM salesperson, a bartender, a folk music teacher, a drawing teacher. He plays guitar, bass and mando’cello. He’s an accomplished painter. For twenty-five years he was minister of Seattle’s Edmond’s Unitarian Church. He’s lived in Thailand, Greece, Japan and France. He sums up All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten in these words: ‘The secret of living a meaningful life is really being there most of the time and putting into practice a handful of things you learned by age six, and then dying young as late as possible. Carrying this off means living with contradictions, which can be done if laughter is carried close to the heart.’

I read the book at a sitting, and I soon realised that Robert was my kind of guy. Over the next few years I bought all his books, and I’ve used passages from them in Sunday services and in meditations on Wednesdays. Unlike some of the other books that have ‘changed my thinking’, I can recommend these without reservation; they are easy to read, full of wry humour, and there’s a big hearted generosity about them, a deep understanding of the human condition, of the messiness and the confusion of our lives, coupled with a gentle and tolerant smile at human foibles and failures. Most of all, these short essays invite us the reappraise the ordinary things of life that so often we take for granted. Doing the laundry, raking leaves, playing hide and seek, having a hair cut all inspire Fulghum to muse on the human condition, to draw simple lessons in living from the very daily-ness of our lives.

Fulghum taught me the importance of humour in approaching the things of the spirit. Too often preachers and teachers are dry, po-faced, earnest, relaying their elevated thoughts to an often uncomprehending and bored audience. The word ‘humour’ comes from the Latin ‘umere’, to be moist, that is fertile and productive, and it probably shares a root with humus, that decomposing stuff which actually enables things to grow better. Fulghum is humorous, down to earth, concerned with the way things actually are, not with some imaginary realm. In this he is in good company. The parables of Jesus are all couched in the language that his first hearers would have understood well – fishing, farm work, wedding celebrations, flowers growing in a field. The first law of successful preaching is, speak about the things that people know about, use analogies and metaphors drawn from common experience. Someone has remarked that there are only two kinds of sermon: those which elicit the response, ‘Me, too!’ and those which elicit the response, ‘So what?’ Too often Unitarian sermons prompt the latter reaction. They are full of scholarship, almost to the point of requiring footnotes, and they can often be so concerned with learning that they don’t even touch for a moment on life. Reading Fulghum one is struck by the number of times one thinks, or even exclaims, ‘Me, too!’, or ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’

Fulghum reminds us that the simplest things are our best teachers. We don’t need college degrees in order to understand how to live well. We knew most of what we need to know about human relationships before we learned to read. Learned theological disquisitions take us no further along the road, indeed they may even obscure our pathway, leading us to confuse knowledge of ethics and morality with the ability actually to live ethically and morally. The Buddhists tell the story of a seeker who asked a man renowned for his wisdom: ‘What must I do in order to live properly?’ Without hesitation, the guru replied, ‘What you don’t want someone to do to you, don’t do to someone else.’ ‘But I knew that when I was six years old,’ said the man indignantly. ‘Yes, and now you’re sixty and you still can’t do it.’

The Jews have a similar story about Rabbi Akiba who explained the essence of Judaism while standing on one leg: ‘What is hateful to you, do not do to your brother.’ And Jesus said that the whole of the law and the prophets could be summed up like this: ‘Love the Lord your God, with your whole soul, your whole heart and your whole mind, and your neighbour as yourself.’ The basics of ethical living are not hard to learn; they are just hard to put into practice. The essence is simple; it’s the commentary that’s complicated. But, O how we love the commentary, especially when it gives us a get-out clause, when it gives us an excuse to do what we know we shouldn’t do! The important things can be expressed simply and briefly:

In the Lord’s Prayer there are 56 words;

The Lord’s my Shepherd has 118 words;

The Ten Commandments have 297 words;

A recent US Department of Agriculture Order on the price of cabbage contained just over 16,000 words. (Brian D’Arcy, Through the Year with Brian D’Arcy, The Columba Press, Dublin. Page 33.)

I’ve recently been collecting together all the sermons I’ve preached here in Dublin over the past fourteen or so years. There are nearly a million words; but in the main it’s commentary. When it comes down to it, as far as living one’s life is concerned, no sermon by me or anyone else is going to improve on what Rabbi Akiba said, or Jesus. Or Robert Fulghum, for that matter.  Can you improve on this?

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 into 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, says Robert. And he’s right. Just 166 words.

Robert helped me to realise the importance of simple stories to get over important spiritual lessons. Take the story I told the children today. It develops one of the points that we have just heard – that we should ‘hold hands and stick together’, and we can approach this important topic in a dry, academic way by analysing what the philosophers and theologians have said about human solidarity. We can look at the Bible, tracing the growth of community in Judaism, the realisation that what affects one affects all; we can quote St. Paul on the way all the parts of the body are intimately connected. We can go on to mention how the English poet John Donne in his Meditation XVII told us that

No man is an island, entire of itself…any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Finally we could quote Pastor Niemoller who, in 1946, condemned the silence of many German intellectuals when the Nazis rose to power in Germany, in these celebrated words:

First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist;
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist;
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew;
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak out for me.

Yes, we can develop the theme in this way and it will sound very learned and very sophisticated. But most of it would be forgotten before we got down the steps on our way home. But whether we’re six or sixty we’ll remember the story of the mouse and the mousetrap. The lesson of the sermon is the lesson of the story, but the story transcends age differences, and the story has an impact that the sermon can rarely match. There’s nothing wrong with a sermon, of course, as long as we remember that its function is, by and large, to remind us in sophisticated language what we’ve long been aware of in more simple terms.

Robert, along with others, taught me the importance of paying attention. The biggest word of all, he says, is not ‘monotheism’ or ‘transubstantiation’ or ‘soteriology’ or ‘eschatology’ – the pretentious and off-putting ‘big’ words of theology: it’s ‘look’. All the spiritual mentors make much of this, telling us unequivocally that most of our problems stem from the fact that we don’t see things properly, that we’re wandering around with our eyes closed, ‘the blind leading the blind’, living in yesterday, planning for tomorrow, oblivious of today. Meister Eckhart, the 12^th century German mystic said:

If I spent enough time with the tiniest creature –
even a caterpillar –
I would never have to prepare a sermon.
So full of God is every creature.

Robert has much the same approach, except that he probably wouldn’t use the word ‘God’. Look at anything, he says, pay attention to anything – an animal, a plant, a human being, an incident, the food you are eating, the thought you are thinking – and really be present to it, and you are doing what the world’s spiritual mentors have told us to do for thousands of years. ‘When I eat, I eat,’ say the Buddhists; ‘When I sleep I sleep. When I wash the pots, I wash the pots.’ Learning to do this is living the spiritual life. You don’t have to pay thousands of euros for spiritual training courses; you just have to learn to do the ordinary things attentively. This is the consistent message of Fulghum’s work.

Finally, let me add that it’s the humanity of Robert Fulghum which appeals to me most of all. As you read his essays, you soon realise you are in the company of someone who understands what it means to be a flawed human being. He doesn’t preach down to us from a pedestal. He doesn’t intimidate us with his moral superiority. He acknowledges his own frailty while describing the foibles and follies of others. One of my favourite Fulghum pieces is the title essay from the book It Was on Fire when I lay down on it. It describes a news report of a man was discovered lying on a burning bed; when asked how the fire started, the man replied, ‘I don’t know; it was on fire when I lay down on it.’  Fulghum doesn’t see this as an example of human idiocy, but as a parable of the human condition. We all, the author included, lie down on burning beds – in that we all knowingly put ourselves in physically and morally dangerous situations. We all do things we know we are going to regret even before we do them. This is what being human is all about, and recognising that we are all prone to it should help to reduce the judgemental arrogance with which we customarily approach the follies of others.

Wit, humanity, simplicity, sound spiritual advice, refreshing honesty, noble sentiments, Fulghum has them all. His work has been translated into 27 languages, and there are sixteen million copies of his books in print. They are all available on Amazon. Start with All I Really Need to Know I learned in Kindergarten, and dip into it, don’t read it all at once. You won’t be disappointed.

21^st February, 2010