When I was growing up, my mother taught me and my sisters to celebrate each other - there was no room in our household for negativity. She taught us to embrace each other, and this was empowering for us. She also taught us the value of celebrating our differences.
I was brought up by a Victorian Grandmother. We were taught to work jolly hard. We were taught to prove yourself; we were taught self reliance; we were taught to live within our income. You were taught that cleanliness is next to Godliness. You were taught self respect. You were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour. You were taught tremendous pride in your country. All of these things are Victorian values. They are also perennial values. You don't hear so much about these things these days, but they were good values and they led to tremendous improvements in the standard of living.
As children, we looked up to our maids and our nannies, who were playing in some ways the role of our mothers. They were paid to be nice to us, to look after us, teach us things and take time out of their day to be with us. As a child you think of these people as an extension of your mother.
Growing up in Middlesbrough I was taught to be resilient and competitive. My teachers made us believe that just because kids were at private school up the road, it didn't mean they were better than us.
We understood, growing up - 'cause it was taught in our family home, my mom and dad - to respect women, for instance. To respect yourself. That you respect your name. Those are the kind of things we were taught.
We all have to acknowledge the life and the path we were born into. And the things that define us, they're often somewhat narrow: our class, our race, our gender, where we grew up, what geography we were exposed to. The curiosity and wonderment of, "What it's like on your path?" - that's when you go into high alert.
People usually asked her if she had a belly button. Of course she had a belly button. She couldn't explain how. She didn't really want to know.
I had a dream that she put her foot through my belly button and I was playing this little piggy went to the market just with her toes, just her foot was sticking out of my belly button and it was completely normal!
Growing up on a farm taught me a reverence for all forms of life. We were a large and poor farm family, so that meant that we had to kill and eat our animal friends. When you do that you are aware of the sacrifice that someone is making so that you may live. My mother always made sure we were thankful for those precious gifts.
Korea taught me nothing, for no one spoke of it when I was growing up, except as something about how wonderful the girls in Japan were. Vietnam taught some of us more than we perhaps ever wished to know.
Belly buttons were a big battle of mine. Down at the syndicate, they would clip them out with a razor blade. I began putting so many of them in, in the margins and everywhere, that they had a little box down there called 'Beetle Bailey''s Belly-Button Box. The editors finally gave up after I did one strip showing a delivery of navel oranges.
I don't think of God as an old white man with no belly button, nor even an old black woman with no belly button. But I agree that God is something eternal. Something cannot come out of nothing. I believe God is Everything. And I believe in infinity.
Our children are exposed to 10, 20, 30 times the number of words that our great-grandfathers were exposed to. We're exposed in a single day or two to more horror on our Internet Web pages than our great-grandfathers were exposed to in decades of living. We have not created modern minds for that modern world. Science and technology has just dumped it on us. And I think people yearn for it. I think you see it in what's popular. Why are people wanting to learn about meditation and talking about a purpose-driven life? It's because they know more is needed in the modern world.
When I grew up, my father taught us the value of hard work. He wanted us to enjoy ourselves, but he also wanted to know what it took to be successful. He coached a lot of our sports teams growing up. We weren't very good, but we learned about hard work and enjoying life and your teammates.
My dad worked nights mostly and while we were growing up, and my mother also worked, so there were times where, when it was just the two of us at home, and, you know, they gave us a pretty long leash, actually.
I'm not Catholic, but I gave up picking my belly button for lint.