Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind; the race is long and, in the end, it's only with yourself (Mary Schmich)

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

A colleague, endearingly known to us English teacher types as 'Smurf', suggested I write a post focusing on the 'song' Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen). Good idea.

So here 'tis...

First - some background trivia: 

Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen) was a spoken word song that Baz Luhrmann, the Australian film director, kind of nursed into existence (the voice is Lee Perry's and the writer was Mary Schmich). I couldn't find it on Spotify, but it is on YouTube. You can see the original video for it here.

As I've used it to farewell Year 13 students in previous schools, I can't believe this hasn't cropped up on one of my blogs to date. TBF it could have landed up on Goo Goo G'Joob (it's a song after all);  Wozza's Place (it's pulp pop culture advice after all); on The Purdzilla Show (it's a pithy set of quotes after all); or here (it's got an educational vibe after all).

I do like these spoken word advisories, and spoken word songs in general, like Gil Scott-Heron's poetry set to Brian Jackson's jazzy accompaniment (try The Revolution Will Not Be Televised), or Billy Bragg's Walk Away Renee, or The Eels Susan's House for instance.

When I was a student at school in the seventies, some teachers were fond of quoting from Les Crane's The Desiderata. That one seems extremely dated now.

About that same time, Tom Clay's still moving paean to the Kennedys and MLK called What The World Needs Now (Abraham, Martin and John)  deeply affected me, and it still carries an emotional punch. However, unlike Sunscreen, the advice is indirect.

So, as I told Smurf, the closest thing I can link to Sunscreen is Robert Fulghum's All I Really Need To Know I learned In Kindergarten.

“These are the things I learned (in Kindergarten):

1. Share everything.
2. Play fair.
3. Don't hit people.
4. Put things back where you found them.
5. CLEAN UP YOUR OWN MESS.
6. Don't take things that aren't yours.
7. Say you're SORRY when you HURT somebody.
8. Wash your hands before you eat.
9. Flush.
10. Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you.
11. Live a balanced life - learn some and drink some and draw some and paint some and sing and dance and play and work everyday some.
12. Take a nap every afternoon.
13. When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands, and stick together.
14. 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.
15. Goldfish and hamster and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup - they all die. So do we.
16. And then remember the Dick-and-Jane books and the first word you learned - the biggest word of all - LOOK.” 

At this time of the year I often think about offering the advice found in Sunscreen and Kindergarten to departing students.

But really the pithiest advice/suggestion comes from Polonius to his son Laertes in Hamlet:

This above all: to thine own self be true, 

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.