Emotions and Kindergarten

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Most of us in life are rarely in healthy balanced relationships. We are, more likely, in a variety of dependent or codependent relationships which we enter with a great deal of baggage we bring with us from our past.

The key to effective discussions between partners in relationships is empathy and compassion. Allowing ourselves to experience our emotions during disagreements keeps us compassionate, not only to ourselves, but to our partner as well. Once we turn our feelings off, we become automatons who respond with no more caring than the computer on which we blog. We can learn to disagree without being disagreeable by following the simple rules we learned in kindergarten:

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.
Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.
Remember 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.[Source: "ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN" by Robert Fulghum. See his web site at http://www.robertfulghum.com/ ]