The older I get the more I discover that my earliest educational milestones are more beneficial than my professional training.
I think it has something to do with the fact that in college, and certainly in graduate school and other certification coursework, the focus gets both narrow and esoteric. It leaves behind the pedestrian qualities of our basic humanness, perhaps based on the assumption that we’ve already got that down, which, of course, in so many cases we clearly have not!
I’m talking about sharing, waiting my turn, giving my best effort, helping a friend, saying ‘thank you’, not interrupting, asking for help, and so on.
When Robert Fulghum wrote that all we really need to know we learned in kindergarten, he was speaking about a set of generalized values and behaviors that truly are the grease in the gears of society.
What exactly each gear is for and how exactly each gear functions is the domain of competent specialists and that remains important work. That said, it is the manner in which those gears intersect – the smoothness of their interactions – that makes the difference in how we feel, which makes the difference in how we live.
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