All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum

even a cold beer. And there is nothing in your budget to give away to someone else.
We don’t help people who don’t have better values than you do.
”
    WHAM!
    Nothing for joy.
    Nothing to give away.
    No help for people who don’t have better values than I.
    Lesson Three. Lesson learned.
    There was much joy in my next budget. The dean approved it. But it wasn’t until I told someone else this story that I realized that what I had to give away was this story itself.

 
     
     

    S TUFF
    M OVING IS A BLOW to my self-image. I like to think I am reasonably clean and tidy. But comes that moment after all the furniture and possessions have been removed from my rooms, and I come back to see if I’ve left anything, and I look at the floor and there’s all this STUFF around. Behind where the desk was, and behind where the bookcase was, and behind where the bed was, and in the corner once occupied by the chest-of-drawers.
    Stuff. Gray. Fuzzy. Hairy. Grotty. Stuff.
    Look at all that dirt, I think. I am not so very nice and clean after all, I think. What would the neighbors think? I think. What would my mother say? I think. What if
they
come to inspect? I think. I got to clean it up quick, I think. This Stuff. It’s
always
there when I move.
What is it?
    I read in a medical journal that a laboratory analyzed this Stuff. They were working on the problems of people with allergies, but their results apply here.
    The findings: particles of wool, cotton, and paper, bug chunks, food, plants, tree leaves, ash, microscopic spores of fungi and single-celled animals, and a lot of unidentifiable odds and ends, mostly natural and organic.
    But that’s just the miscellaneous list. The majority of Stuff comes from just two sources:
people—
exfoliated skin and hair; and
meteorites—
disintegrated as they hit the earth’s atmosphere.
(No kidding—it’s true—tons of it fall every day.)
In other words, what’s behind my bed and bookcase and dresser and chest is mostly me and stardust.
    A botanist told me that if you gather up a bunch of Stuff in a jar and put some water in it and let it sit in the sunlight and then plant a seed in it, the seed will grow like crazy; or if you do the same thing but put it in a damp, dark place, mushrooms will grow in it. And then, if you eat the mushrooms, you may see stars.
    Also, if you really want to see a lot of it, take the sheet off your bed, shake it hard in a dark room, and then turn on a beamed flashlight. There you are. Like the little snowman in the round glass ball on the mantel at Grandma’s house. London Bridge is falling down and I am falling down and the stars are falling down. And everything else is falling down, to go around again, some say.
    Scientists have pretty well established that we come from a stellar birthing room.
    We are the Stuff of stars.
    And there behind my desk, I seem to be returning to my source, in a quiet way. Recombining with the Stuff of the universe into who-knows-what. And I’ve a heightened respect for what’s going on in the nooks and crannies of my room.
    It isn’t dirt. It’s all compost. Cosmic compost.

 
     
     

    V ACUUMS
    A MAN I HAD NOT SEEN in years stopped me on the street recently. He once was a nodding-acquaintance neighbor who lived up at the end of the block. “How’s business?” I asked, and he came back with “Business really sucks!” and laughed. I knew he was going to say this. It’s been his trademark quip for years. He’s a regional sales manager for a vacuum cleaner company. His humor is tacky, but I like his enthusiasm and the confidence he has in his product line.
    “Anything you want to suck up or blow away, anywhere, anytime, we got the machine,” he says. HandiVac, ShopVac, SuperVac and specialty rigs to clean out chimneys and furnaces. He’s got built-in systems for whole buildings, vacuum cleaners to slurp up chemical and oil pollutants. And he’s got blowers—leaf blowers, grass blowers, and underwater trash blower