Don't Believe Everything You Think! - Robert Fulghum

From the first day we are told in words we can handle what has come to be prized as the foundation of community and culture. Though the teacher may call these first lessons “simple rules,” they are in fact the distillation of all the hard-won, field-tested working standards of the human enterprise.

There are places we all come from — deep-rooty-common places — that make us who they are. And we disdain them or treat them lightly at our peril. We turn our backs on them at the risk of self-contempt. There is a sense in which we need to go home again — and can go home again. Not to recover home, no. But to sanctify memory.

For forty years I combed my hair that way, and every time I did, I pushed my mother away from me. There was much she didn’t like about my life — and the parting of my hair became a ritual parting of the ways with her.