Love what life is all about leo buscaglia

LO\/E

Leo Buscaglia, Ph. D.

G.K. HALL & CO. Boston, Massachusetts

1989

Copyright © l972 by Leo F.Buscalia.

All rights reserved.

See.p. 169, which is an extension of this page.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Buscaglia, Leo F. Love / Leo Buscaglia. _ p. cm.—(G.K. Hall large print book series) Reprint. Originally published: Thorofare, N.J. : Slack, c1972. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8161-4511-3 (lg. print) 1. Love. 2. Large type books. I. Title. [BF575.L8B842 1989] l58’.2—dc19 88-25170

This book is dedicated to Tulio and Rosa Buscaglia, my father and mother who were my best teachers of love, because they never taught me, they showed me. This book is also dedicated to all those who have helped me to continue to grow in love, and those who will help me tomorrow.

Leo Buscaglia

“To cheat oneself out of love is the most terrible deception; it is an eternal loss for which there is no reparation, either in time or in eternity.”

—Kierkegaard

Contents

Introduction

Forward to Love

Love As A Learned Phenomenon

Man Needs To Love And Be Loved

A Question of Definition

Love Knows No Age

Love Has Many Deterrents

To Love Others You Must First Love Yourself

To Love You Must Free Yourself Of Labels

Love Involves Responsibility

Love Recognizes Needs

Love Requires One To Be Strong

Love Offers No Apology

Introduction

In the winter of 1969, an intelligent, sensitive female student of mine committed suicide. She was from a seemingly fine upper middle class family. Her grades were excellent. She was popular and sought after. On the particular day in January she drove her car along the cliffs of Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, left the motor running, walked to the edge of a deep cliff overlooking the sea and leaped to her death on the rocks below. She left no note, not a word of explanation. She was only twenty.

I have never been able to forget her eyes; alert, alive, responsive, full of promise. I can even recall her papers and examinations which I always read with interest. I wrote on one of her papers which she never received, “A very fine paper. Perceptive, intelligent and sensitive. It indicates your ability to apply what you have learned to your ‘real’ life. Nice work!” What did I know about her “real” life?

I often wonder what I would read in her eyes or her papers if I could see them now. But, as with so many people and situations in our life, we superficially experience them, they pass and can never again be experienced in the same manner.

I was not blaming myself for her death. I simply wondered what I might have done; if I could have, even momentarily, helped.

It was this question, more than anything else, that led me, in that year, to start an experimental class. It was to be an informal group with voluntary attendance, where any student could be present or drop out at any time, if he so desired. It was to be dedicated to personal growth. I did not want it to become problem-centered or group psychotherapy nor an encounter group. I was an educator, not a psychotherapist. I wanted this class to be a unique experience in learning. I wanted it to have a definite, yet loose, framework and be of broad interest and import to the student. I wanted it to be related to his immediate experience. Students with whom I was relating were, more than ever, concerned with life, living, sex, growth, responsibility, death, hope, the future. It was obvious that the only subject which encompassed, and was at the core of all these concerns and more, was love.

I called the class, “Love Class.”

I knew beforehand that I could not “teach”—in the formal sense—such a class. It would be presumptuous. I too was limited in my knowledge and experience of the subject. I was as actively engaged as any of my students in discovering what the real meanings of the word were. I would only be able to act as a facilitator to the students as we guided each other closer to an understanding of the delicate phenomenon of human love.

My determination to start such a class was met with no resistance as long as it was taught free of salary and on my own time without load credit. Of course, a few eyebrows were raised by those who didn’t consider love a scholarly subject nor a serious part of a university curriculum.

I was highly amused in the ensuing weeks by the odd looks I received from some colleagues. One professor, in discussing my plans over lunch in the Faculty Center, called love—and anyone who purported to teach it—“irrelevant!” Others asked mockingly and with a wild leer, if the class had a lab requirement and was I going to be the primary investigator.

Nevertheless, student attendance at the class kept growing until we had to close enrollment with 100 students per year. The students were of all ages, from freshmen to graduates, obviously of varying degrees of experience and sophistication. All were unique and, as such, had individual approaches to the subject and some special knowledge to share.

This book is an outgrowth of “Love Class.” It is, as such, in no way intended to be a scholarly, deeply philosophical or definitive work on love. It’s rather a sharing of some of the practical and vital ideas, feelings and observations which emerged from the group that seemed to me relevant to the human condition. It might be said that the classes and I wrote this book together. The book may be said to have over 400 authors.

We never attempted nor in three years were able to define love. We felt as we grew in love, that to define it would be to delimit it and love seemed infinite. As one student stated, “I find love much like a mirror. When I love another, he becomes my mirror and I become his, and reflecting in each other’s love we see infinity!”

Forward to Love

(An excerpt from a speech delivered in Texas 1970— and since.)

If we are going to be “loving” together, it’s important that you know who I am and where I’m “at.” My name is B-U-S-C-A-G-L-I-A, and it’s pronounced like everything in the world. I always start by telling this story because I think it’s delightful. Recently I placed a long distance call, the line was busy, and the operator said she’d call me back. I gave her my name, waited a while, and then the phone rang. When I picked it up, she said. “Would you please tell Dr. Boxcar that his telephone call is through?” I said, “Could that be Buscaglia?” She giggled and said, “Sir, it could be damn near anything!”

I have a wonderful time with my name because not only is it Buscaglia, but if you’ll look at it you’ll see that it’s also Leo F. Well, it’s really Leonardo, the middle initial is F, but that’s really the first name, and it’s Felice, that means happiness. Isn’t that fantastic? Felice Leonardo Buscaglia! Recently I wanted to visit the Communist-block countries, and I needed a visa. I was in a large room in Los Angeles and filled out a very official form which I turned in. After which, I was asked to sit down and wait for my name to be called. When the time came, this poor man stood at his counter for a moment and looked at the form and I knew it was me he was going to call. He did sort of a double take, took a deep breath, looked up, and said, “Phyllis?” And I swear I’ll answer to anything, but Phyllis.

Yes, I am in a “love bag,” and I’m not ashamed of it. I have one single message, and I can give you that now. Then you can lay the book aside, go for a walk and hold hands with someone or what you will.

We are in a time in our society when we’re really beginning to look at what life is all about, what is learning, and what are the processes of change. We’re becoming acquainted with a new nomenclature. We’re looking at “conditioning,” we’re looking at “behavior shaping and modification,”

reinforcement, that it is necessary to reinforce, that what is reinforced will probably effect behavior. We are using all kinds of things to reinforce. We’re using money, we’re using bells, we’re using electric shocks. We’re even using candy. M M’s have become the big thing, and when somebody gives the correct response, we pop an M M into his mouth. My message to you today is simply that the best M M in the world is a warm, pulsating, non-melting human being—YOU! Real love is a very human phenomenon.

About five years ago I started a love class at the University. I am—-I’m teaching a class in love, and we are probably the only University in the country that does have such a class. It meets on Tuesday nights. We sit on the floor and relate, and I’m sure the vibrations are felt all over the world. I don’t teach love, of course, I simply facilitate growth in love.

Love is a learned phenomenon, and I think the sociologists, the anthropologists, the psychologists, will tell us this with no hesitation. What worries me is that maybe many of us are not happy with the way we’ve learned it. As experienced human beings we must certainly believe in one thing more than anything else—we believe in change. And so, if you don’t like where you’re at in terms of love, you can change it, you can create a new scene. You can only give away what you have. That’s the miracle. If you have love, you can give it. If you don’t have it, you don’t have it to give. Actually it’s not really even a matter of giving, is it? It’s a matter of sharing. Whatever I have I can share with you. I don’t lose it because I still have it. For example, I could teach every reader everything I know. I would still know everything I know. It is possible for me—and not unreasonable—to love everyone with equal intensity and still have all the love energy I have ever had. There are a lot of miracles to being a human being, but this is one of the greatest miracles.

Only recently has it become at all defensible to even mention the word “love.” Every time I go to speak somewhere, someone asks, “Will you talk about love?” I reply, “Sure,” and they say, “What’s your title?” I reply, “Let’s just call it ‘Love.’ ” There’s a brief hesitation, and then they say, “Well, you know, this is a professional meeting, and it may not be understood. What will the press say?” So I suggest “Affect as a Behavior Modifier,” and they agree that sounds more acceptable and scientific and everyone is happy.

Love has really been ignored by the scientists. It’s amazing. My students and I did a study. We went through books in psychology. We went through books in sociology. We went through books in anthropology, and we were hard pressed to find even a reference to the word “love.” This is shocking because it is something we all know we need, something we’re all continually looking for, and yet there’s no class in it. It’s just assumed that it comes to us by and through some mysterious life force.

One of Pitirim Sorokin’s last books was called The Ways and Power of Love. It’s full of wonderful studies of affect in which this man engaged because he was really worried about the fact that everybody seemed to be going in opposite directions. Dr. Albert Schweitzer said, “We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness.” I feel this, you know this, and Dr. Sorokin thought it was true, too. In his book he is trying to share some of the things that might bring us together again.

If we’ve ever needed it, we need it now. In his book’s introduction, he says this: “The sensate mind emphatically disbelieves in the power of love. It appears to us something illusionary. We call it self- deception, the opiate of the people’s mind, unscientific bosh and unscientific delusion.” Some of you were brought up in Econ I class with a textbook by Samuelson. Remember that dreary book? Yet in his latest edition after five editions—can you imagine five editions of the same book?—there is a chapter that’s going to freak you, called “Love and Economics.” It’s a beautiful chapter. In his introduction, he says, “I know my colleagues at Harvard are going to say I have lost my mind, but I want them to know that I have just found it.”

Sorokin also says, “We are biased against all theories that try to prove the power of love in determining human behavior and personality, in influencing the course of biological, social, mental and moral evolution, in affecting the direction of historical events and in shaping social institutions and culture. In the sensate milieu they appear to be unconvincing, certainly unscientific, prejudiced, and superstitious.” And I think that’s really where we are. Love is prejudicial, superstitious, unscientific bosh.

I’d like to relate with you about some of the ways in which I think we can be reinforcing, non-melting, gorgeous, tender, loving human persons. First of all the loving individual has to care about himself. This is number one. I don t mean an ego trip. I’m talking about somebody who really cares about himself, who says, “Everything is filtered through me, and so the greater I am, the more I have to give. The greater knowledge I have, the more I’m going to have to give. The greater understanding I have, the greater is my ability to teach others and to make myself the most fantastic, the most beautiful, the most wondrous, the most tender human being in the world.”

Some exciting work has been going on in California by some great humanist psychologists like Rogers, Maslow, and Herbert Otto. These men and others are saying that only a small portion of what we are, are we, and that there is an enormous potential in the human being, that it isn’t outlandish to say that if we really desired to fly, we could fly! We could have the ability to feel that would be so spectacular that we could feel color! We could have the ability to see better than an eagle, the ability to smell better than a birddog, and a mind that could be so big, it would constantly be full of exciting dreams. Yet we are perfectly happy to be only a small portion of what we are. A London psychiatrist, R.D. Laing, in his book, The Politics of Experience, suggests something very provoking—something alien and rather frightening, yet a wondrous challenge. He says, “What we think is less than what we know: What we know is less than what we love: What we love is so much less than what there is; and to this precise extent, we are much less than what we are.” Isn’t that a mind blower?

Knowing this, we should have a tremendous desire to become. If all of life is directed toward the process of becoming, of growing, of seeing, of feeling, of touching, of smelling, there won’t be a boring second. I scream at my students, “Think of what you are and all the fantastic potential of you.”

It seems to me that in the past we have not sufficiently celebrated the wonderful uniqueness of every

individual. I would agree that personality is the sum total of all the experiences that we have known since the moment of conception to this point in our life along with heredity. But what is often ignored is an X factor. Something within the you of you that is different from every single human being, that will determine how you will project in this world, how you will see this world, how you will become a special human being. That uniqueness is what Worries me because it seems to me that we’re dropping it; we’re losing it. We’re not stressing it; we’re not persuading people to discover it and develop it.

Education should be the process of helping everyone to discover his uniqueness, to teach him how to develop that uniqueness, and then to show him how to share it because that’s the only reason for having anything. Imagine what this world would be like if all along the way you had people say to you, “It’s good that you’re unique; it’s good that you’re different. Show me your differences so that maybe I can learn from them.” But we still see the processes again and again of trying to make everyone like everybody else.

A few years ago with some of my student teachers at the University, I went back into classrooms and was astounded to find the same things going on that had been going on when I was in school—a million years ago. For example, the art teacher would come in. Remember how we always anticipated and got ready for the art teacher? You put your papers down and you got your Crayolas out and you waited and finally in would walk this harried person. I really feel sorry for an itinerant art teacher. She comes racing in from another class and has time only to nod to the teacher, turn around and say, “Boys and girls, today we are going to draw a tree.” She goes to the blackboard, and she draws her tree which is a great big green ball with a little brown base. Remember those lollipop trees? I never saw a tree that looked like that in my life, but she puts it up there, and she says, “All right, boys and girls, draw.” Everybody gets busy and draws.

If you have any sense, even at that early age, you realize that what she really wanted was for you to draw her tree, because the closer you got to her tree, the better your grade. If you already realized this in grade one, then you handed in a little lollipop, and she said, “Oh, that’s divine.” But here’s Junior who really knows a tree as this little woman has never seen a tree in her life. He’s climbed a tree, he’s hugged a tree, he’s fallen out of a tree, he’s listened to the breeze blow through the branches. He really knows a tree, and he knows that a tree isn’t a lollipop! So he takes purple and yellow and orange and green and magenta crayons and he draws this beautiful freaky thing and hands it in. She takes one look and shrieks, “Brain damaged!”

There’s a wonderful story in education that always amuses me. It’s called The Animal School. I always love to tell it because it’s so wild, yet it s true. Educators have been laughing at it for years, but nobody does anything about it. The animals got together in the forest one day and decided to start a school. There was a rabbit, a bird, a squirrel, a fish and an eel, and they formed a Board of Education. The rabbit insisted that running be in the curriculum. The bird insisted that flying be in the curriculum. The fish insisted that swimming be in the curriculum, and the squirrel insisted that perpendicular tree climbing be in the curriculum. They put all of these things together and wrote a

Curriculum Guide. Then they insisted that all of the animals take all of the subjects. Although the rabbit was getting an A in running, perpendicular tree climbing was a real problem for him; he kept falling over backwards. Pretty soon he got to be sort of brain damaged, and he couldn’t run any more. He found that instead of making an A in running, he was making a C and, of course, he always made an F in perpendicular climbing. The bird was really beautiful at flying, but when it came to burrowing in the ground, he couldn’t do so well. He kept breaking his beak and wings. Pretty soon he was making a C in flying as well as an F in burrowing, and he had a hellava time with perpendicular tree climbing. The moral of the story is that the person who was valedictorian of the class was a mentally retarded eel who did everything in a half-way fashion. But the educators were all happy because everybody was taking all of the subjects, and it was called a broad-based education. We laugh at this, but that’s what it is. It’s what you did. We really are trying to make everybody the same as everybody else, and one soon learns that the ability to conform governs success in the educational scene.

Conformity continues right on into the university. We in higher education are as guilty as everyone else. We don’t say to people, “Fly! Think for yourselves.” We give them our old knowledge, and we say to them, “Now this is what is essential. This is what is important.” I know professors who teach nothing but one best “way,” they don’t say, “Here are a lot of tools, now go create your own. Go into abstract thinking. Go into dreaming. Dream a while. Find something new.” Could it not be that among their students there are greater dreamers than themselves? So, it all starts with you. You can only give what you have to give. Don’t give up your tree. Hold onto your tree. You are the only you—the only magical combination of forces that will be and ever has been that can create such a tree. You are the best you. You will always be the second best anyone else. '

We are living in a culture where a person is not measured by who he is or what he is but rather by what he has. If he has a lot, he must be a great man. If he has little, he must be insignificant. About seven years ago I decided that I was going to do something really weird, at least at that time it was considered weird. I was going to sell everything I had, my car, my life insurance policy, my house, all the “important” things, and I was going to take off for a couple of years. I was going to look for me. I spent most of my time in Asia because I knew less about Asia than any other part of the world. The countries of Asia are underdeveloped countries. They have very little and, therefore, they must be terribly insignificant. Well, I found out very differently. Those of you who have been there or have delved into Asian culture will agree how wrong this Western concept is. I learned many, many things in Asia that I brought back with me which have really put me on a different path. Where it is leading I don’t know and I don’t care, but it’s different and exciting and wondrous.

I found a very interesting thing in Cambodia. The country is made up mostly of a great lake called the Tonle Sap. Many people live and work around it. When tourists go to Cambodia, they go directly to Angkor Wat, as they should; it’s fantastic. The Buddhist ruins being devoured by forests of great trees with monkeys swinging through them are unbelievable. It’s beyond your wildest dreams. While I was there, I met a French woman who loved the country so much she stayed on after the French left Cambodia, even though she was a secondary citizen. She really loved the people and the country, and she was willing to put up with whatever it meant. She said to me, “You know, Leo, if you really want to find these people, you won’t find them in the ruins. You’ll find them in their villages. Take my

bicycle and go to the Tonle Sap and see what’s happening now.”

Nature in Cambodia is very severe. Every year the monsoons come and wash everything into the rivers and streams and lakes. So you don’t build great permanent mansions because nature has told you that it will only be washed away. You build little huts. Tourists look and say, “Aren’t they quaint but poor people! living in such squalor.” It’s not squalor. It’s how you perceive it. They love their houses which are comfortable and exactly right for their climate and culture. So I went to the lake. I found the people in the process of getting together and preparing for the monsoons. This meant that they were constructing big communal rafts. When the monsoons come and wash away their houses, several families get on a raft and live together about six months of the year. Wouldn’t it be beautiful to live with your neighbors? Just think if we could make a raft together and live together for six months of the year! What would probably happen to us? All of a sudden we would again realize how important it is to have a neighbor—that I need you because today you may catch the fish that we will eat or I like you because I can sit down and ta1l with you if I’m lonely and learn from you and understand another world. After the rains are over, the families once again live as independent units.

I wanted to help them move so I walked in and offered myself in sign language. But they had nothing to move. A few pots and pans, a couple of mats, a few articles of clothing. I thought, “What would you do if tomorrow there were a monsoon in Los Angeles? What would you take? Your TV set? Your automobile? The vase that Aunt Catherine brought from Rome? Think about that. This was dramatically portrayed to us during the Los Angeles fires. A couple of pictures appeared in the Los Angeles Times that really freaked me. One was of a woman running down the streets of Malibu with a great pile of books, her house in the background being consumed by flames. I thought, “Wow, I would like to know this woman. I would like to know what are those books that she considered to be so valuable.” I brought the picture to a graduate seminar of supposedly really beautiful students. I asked, “What do you think those books were?” You know what they said? “Her income tax reports!” That’s where we are in the U.S.A. I even heard of one woman who fled with her blue chip stamps! She said, “I don’t know why I did it,” which shows you how silly it all is. But you know what she did have? She still had herself! That’s what it’s all about. In the end, you have only you.

Then I think this loving person rids himself of labels. You know, we are really marvelous. Being human is the greatest thing in the world, but we’re also funny, and we have to learn to laugh again. After all, we do funny things. We created time, for instance, and then became the slave of time. Like now—you may be thinking in the back of your mind that you have only ten minutes before you must do this or that. You may be somewhere where something really incredible is happening, but it’s 10:07, time to leave, and so you’ve got to move on. We have bells which ring. Bells! Every time we hear a bell, we respond. It tells us that we must be here or we must be there. We created time, and now we have become the slave of time.

The same thing is true with words. When you read books like Hayakawa’s The Use and Misuse of Language or Wendell ]ohnson’s book, People in Quandries, you see how tremendously powerful language is. A word is just a few phonetic meaningless symbols side by side. You give it meaning,

and then it sticks with you. You give it a cognitive meaning, and you give it an emotional meaning, and then you live with it. Dr. Timothy Leary did some fantastic work on the mind when he was at Harvard. He said, “Words are a freezing of reality.” Once you learn a word and get the intellectual and emotional meaning of that word, you are stuck with that word the rest of your life. So, your world of words is built. Everything that happens is filtered through this stuck, frozen system, and that keeps us from growing. We say things like “He’s a Communist.” Pow! We turn him off. We stop listening. Some people say, “He’s a Jew.” Pow! we turn him off. We’ve ceased respecting him. “He’s a Dago.” Pow! Labels, labels, labels! How many kids have not been educated just because someone pinned a label on them somewhere along the line? Stupid, dumb, emotionally disturbed. I have never known a stupid child. Never! Never! I’ve only known children and never two alike. Labels are distancing phenomena. They push us away from each other. Black man. What’s a black man? I’ve never known two alike. Does he love? Does he care? What about his kids? Has he cried? Is he lonely? Is he beautiful? Is he happy? Is he giving something to someone? These are the important things. Not the fact that he is a black man or Jew or Dago or Communist or Democrat or Republican.

I had a very unique experience in my childhood. You can look in the annals because it’s all recorded. I was born in Los Angeles, and my parents were Italian immigrants. A big family. Mama and Papa were obviously great lovers! They came from a tiny village at the base of the Italian Swiss Alps where everyone knew everyone. Everyone knew the names of the dogs, and the village priest came out and danced in the streets at the fiestas and got as drunk as everybody else. It was the most beautiful scene in the world and a pleasure to be raised by these people in this old way. But when I was taken, at five, to a public school, tested by some very official-looking person, the next thing I knew I was in a class for the mentally retarded! It didn’t matter that I was able to speak Italian and an Italian dialect. I also spoke some French and Spanish—but I didn’t speak English too well and so I was mentally retarded. I think the term now is “culturally disadvantaged.” I was put into this class for the mentally retarded, and I never had a more exciting educational experience in my life! Talk about a warm, pulsating, loving, teacher. Her name was Miss Hunt, and I’m sure she was the only one in the school who would teach those “dumb” kids. She was a great bulbous woman. She liked me even if I smelled of garlic. I remember when she used to come and lean over me, how I used to cuddle! I did all kinds of learning for this woman because I really loved her. Then one day I made a tremendous mistake. I wrote a newspaper as if I were a Roman. I described how the gladiators would perform and so on. The next thing I knew I was being retested and was transferred to a regular classroom after which I was bored for the rest of my educational career.

This was a traumatic time for me. People went around calling me a Dago and a Wop, very popular expressions at that time. I didn’t understand it. I remember talking to Papa, who was a big—still is— patriarchal type of guy. I asked, “What is a Dago? What is a Wop?” And he replied, “Oh, never mind, Felice, people always call names. It doesn’t mean anything. They don’t know anything about you by calling you names. Don’t let it bother you.” But it did! It did because it distanced me. It put me aside. It gave me a label. I felt a little sorry, too, because it meant that these people didn’t know any- thing about me, although they thought they did, by calling me a Dago. That categorized me. That made them comfortable. They didn’t know, for instance, that my mother was a singer and that my dad was a waiter when he first came to this country. He used to work most of the night, and Mama was a little

bit lonely. And so she would gather all eleven of us around and play Aida or La Boheme, how we’d fight over the roles! I remember I was the best Butterfly in the family. I still am, and when the Metropolitan Opera discovers me, they’l1 have their definitive performance. By the time we were ten or eleven, we knew these operas by heart and could play all the roles. People missed all this by a narrow label.

They also didn’t know, for instance, that Mama thought that no diseases would come if you had garlic around your neck. She’d rub garlic and tie it up in a hanky and put it around our necks and send us off to school. And I’ll tell you a small secret: I had perfect health. I was never sick a day. I have my theories about this—-I don’t think anyone ever got close enough to me to pass any germs. Now, having become sophisticated and having given up my garlic, I get a cold a year. They didn’t know this by calling me a Wop and a Dago. And they didn’t know about Papa’s rule that before we left the table, we had to tell him something new that we had learned that day. We thought this was really horrible— what a crazy thing to do! While my sisters and I were washing our hands and fighting over the soap, I’d say, “Well, we’d better learn something,” and we’d dash to the encyclopedia and flip to something like “The population of Iran is one million . . .” and we’d mutter to our- selves “The population of Iran is. . . .” We’d sit down and after a dinner of great big dishes of spaghetti and mounds of veal so high you couldn’t even see across the table, Papa would sit back and take out his little black cigar and say, “Felice, what did you learn new today?” And I’d drone, “The population of Iran is. . . .” Nothing was insignificant to this man. He’d turn to my mother and say, “Rosa, did you know that?” She’d reply, impressed, “No.” We’d think, “Gee, these people are crazy.” But I’ll tell you a secret. Even now going to bed at night, as exhausted as I often am, I still lie back and say to myself, “Felice, old boy, what did you learn new today?” And if I can’t think of anything, I’ve got to get a book and flip to something before I can get to sleep. Maybe this is what learning is all about. But they didn’t know that when they called me a Dago. Labels are distancing phenomena—stop using them! And when people use them around you, have the gumption and the guts to say, “What and who are you talking about be- cause I don’t know any such thing.” If each and every one of you stop it, it’s going to stop. There is no word vast enough to begin to describe even the simplest of man. But only you can stop it. A loving person won’t stand for it. There are too many beautiful things about each human being to call him a name and then put him aside.

Then this loving person must be one who recognizes responsibility. There is no greater responsibility in the world than being a human being, and you’d better believe it.

This loving person is a person who abhors waste—waste of time, waste of human potential. How much time we waste. As if we were going to live forever. I have to tell you this story because it is one of my greatest experiences. We had a young lady in our School of Education that I thought perhaps had the possibilities of being one of the greatest teachers of all time. She was absolutely psychedelic, and she loved kids. She was so turned on that it was impossible to hold her down—“I want to get with them, I want to get with them.” She went through school, was graduated and was hired, of course, because she was so beautiful—spiritually, mentally, every way. She was assigned to a first grade class. I remember the whole process because I was let in on it, step by step, in great moments of wonderment on her part.

When she got in her classroom she looked at the Curriculum Guide which said-—and you know we are still doing this—the first unit would be “The Store”—the S-T-O-R-E. She looked at it, and she said, “That’s not possible. This is 1970, U.S.A. These kids were raised in stores. They were wheeled around in little baskets in stores. They knocked over Campbell Soup cans and they spilled milk. They know what a store is. What are we doing studying a store?” Nevertheless this was what it said in the Curriculum Guide, and so she thought, “Well, maybe there is some merit and I can have a really exciting unit on the store. I’ll really try.” On that first day she sat down with the kids on the rug, and she said, very enthusiastically, “Boys and girls, how would you like to study the store?” They said, “Rotten!”

Kids are not as stupid nowadays as they used to be. McLuhan has shown that most children have seen 5,000 hours of TV before they reach kindergarten. They have seen murders and rapes, they have seen love affairs, they have heard music, they have been to Paris, to Rome. On their TV set they have seen real people die violently. Then we bring them to school, and we teach them about stores. Or we give them a book that says, “Tom said, ‘Oh, Oh.’ Mary said ‘Oh, Oh.’ Grandma said, ‘Oh, Oh.’ Spot said, ‘Oh, Oh.’ ” Well, damn Spot! It’s about time that we started realizing that we are educating children, not things. We must say, “Who is the new child we are educating and what are his needs?” How else can he survive tomorrow?”

And so this little girl, because she was a real teacher, said, “Okay, what do you want to study?” One little kid’s eyes opened real wide, and he said, “You know, my father works at ]et Propulsion Labs, and he can get us a rocket ship, and we could put up a rocket ship and learn all about it and fly to the moon!” All the kids said, “Groovy! That’s great!” So she said, “Okay, let’s do it.” The next day the father came and set up a rocket ship. He sat down on the rug with the kids, and he told them about flying to the moon and how a rocket ship works. You should have seen what was happening in that classroom. They were talking about science astronomy, complex theories of math. They had a vocabulary not of “oh, oh,” but of parts of a rocket ship, galaxies, space; a meaningful vocabulary.

Then one day in the middle of all of this fantastic learning, in walked the supervisor. She looked around and said, “Mrs. W, where is your store?” Some day I’m going to write this story for The New Yorker, and I’m going to call it “Mrs. W, Where Is Your Store?” The young teacher took the supervisor aside, saying, “You know, we talked about the store, but the kids wanted to fly to the moon. Look at our vocabulary lists and look at the books they are making. Next we are going to have a man from Jet Propulsion who is going to do a demonstration. . . .” The supervisor said, “Nevertheless, Mrs. W, the Curriculum Guide says you will have a store, and you will have a store”—(tight smile)—“Won’t you, dear?”

She came to me and said, “What’s this bit you have been feeding me about creativity in education, getting me blown up and excited, and then I begin teaching, and I have to make clay bananas!” You ate a banana, you slipped on a banana peel, you got sick on bananas—then you spent a six-week unit making artificial clay bananas for the store. Time’s awasting! And so do you know what she did? She

sat down with her kids, and she said, “Kids, do you want Mrs. W to be here next year?” And they said, “Oh, yes!” “Well, then, we’ve got to make a store.” And they said, “Okay, let’s do it, but let’s do it fast!” In two days they did a six-week unit. They made those damn clay bananas, and they pounded boxes together and put everything in them. She also told them that when the supervisor came, it would be necessary to show her that they could function in a store. When the supervisor came, she was very happy because there was the store, and the little kids would say, “Would you like to buy some bananas today?” And as soon as she left, they flew to the moon! Hypocrisy! And waste, waste, waste!

It isn’t enough to live and learn for today. We have to dream about what the world is going to be like in fifty years and educate for a hundred years hence and a dream world of a thousand years hence. The world today for the first grader is not going to be his world in thirty years. Look at how our world has changed. No wonder we are confused and up tight and anxious — we were not prepared to deal with the world we are living in. And it’s moving so fast! There isn’t time for “Grandma said, ‘Oh, Oh.’ ”

Then I think this loving individual is a person who is spontaneous. This is something that I feel really, really strongly about because I think that we have lost our ability to be spontaneous. We are all marking time, and we are all regimented. We have forgotten what it is to laugh and to feel good laughing. We are taught that a young sophisticated lady does not laugh boisterously—she titters. Who said? Emily Post? She’s sick! Why should we listen to somebody else tell us how to live our existence? Yet every day we see in the papers “Dear Miss Post, My daughter is being married in February. What kind of flowers should she carry?” If your daughter wants to carry radishes, let her carry them. “Dear Interior Decorator, I have puce curtains in my living room. What color should my rug be?” I can just see this little cat sitting in his office saying, “Heh, heh, heh.” And he replies, “Purple.” So you run out and buy thousands of dollars worth of purple rugs with puce curtains, and you’re stuck with them, and you deserve it! We don’t trust our own feelings any more. Men don’t cry. Who said? If you feel like crying, you cry. I cry all the time. I cry when I’m happy, I cry when I’m sad, I cry when a student says something beautiful, I cry when I read poetry.

If you feel something, let people know that you feel it. Don’t you get tired of these stoic faces that don’t show anything? If you feel like laughing, laugh. If you like what somebody says, go up and give them a hug. If it is right, it will be right. Spontaneity again, living again, knowing what it is like to tingle. Sometimes I get up in the morning, and I feel so freaky and good, I can’t stand it. I remember once driving to work, and I was singing Butterfly, the love duet, both roles, best performance I’d ever given, and a policeman stuck his head in the window, he had a great big grin on his face, and he said, “This is going to be the funniest ticket I’ve ever given.” I said, “How’s that, Officer?” He said, “I was chasing someone for speeding, and you passed us both up.” I love that. I hadn’t even seen him. I was in my own beautiful world.

We are constantly moving away from ourselves and others. The scene seems to be how far away you can get from another person, not how close you can get to them. I’m all for going back to the old- fashioned thing of touching people. My hand always goes out because when I touch somebody, I know

they are alive. We really need that affirmation. The existentialist says that we all think we are invisible and that sometimes we have to commit suicide to affirm the fact that we have lived at all. Well, I don’t want to do that. There are better, less drastic ways of affirming it. If somebody hugs you, you know you must be there or they’ll go through you. I hug everybody—just come close to me, you’re more than likely to get hugged, certainly touched.

We need not be afraid to touch, to feel, to show emotion. The easiest thing in the world to be is what you are, what you feel. The hardest thing to be is what other people want you to be, but that’s the scene we are living in. Are you really you or are you what people have told you you are? And are you interested in really knowing who you are because if you are, it is the happiest trip of your life.

And this loving person is also one who sees the continual wonder and joy of being alive. I am sure that contrary to the media, we were meant to be happy because there are so many beautiful things in our world—-trees and birds and faces. There are no two things alike and things are always changing. How can we get bored? There has never been the same sunset twice. Look at everybody’s face. Each face is different. Everybody has his own beauty. There have never been two flowers alike. Nature abhors sameness. Even two blades of grass are different. The Buddhists taught me a fantastic thing. They believe in the here and the now. They say that the only reality is what is here, what is happening between you and me right now. If you live for tomorrow, which is only a dream, then all you are going to have is an unrealized dream. And the past is no longer real. It has value because it made you what you are now, but that is all the value it has. So don’t live in the past. Live now. When you are eating, eat. When you are loving, love. When you are talking with someone, talk. When you are looking at a flower, look. Catch the beauty of the moment!

The loving person has no need to be perfect, only human. The idea of perfection frightens me. We’re almost afraid to do anything anymore because we can’t do it perfectly. Maslow says there are marvelous peak experiences that we all should be experiencing, like creating a pot in ceramics or painting a picture and putting it over here and saying, “That’s an extension of me.” There’s another existentialist theory that says, “I must be because I have done something. I have created something - therefore, I am.” Yet we don’t want to do this because we’re afraid it isn’t going to be good, it isn’t going to be approved of. If you feel like smearing ink on a wall, you do it. Say, “That came out of me, it’s my creation, I did it, and it is good.” But we’re afraid because we want things to be perfect. We want our children to be perfect.

Drawing from personal experiences, I remember my physical education classes in junior and senior high school. If there are any physical education teachers reading this, I hope they hear me loud and clear. I remember the striving for perfection. Physical education should be a place where we all should have an equal opportunity, where our only competition should be with ourselves. If we can’t throw a ball, then we learn to throw a ball the best we can. But that wasn’t it—they were always rewarding perfection. There were always the big muscular guys standing up there. They were the stars. And there I was—skin and bones with my little bag of garlic around my neck, and shorts that didn’t fit and always hung way down my little skinny legs. I’d stand there in line while we were being

chosen in games, and I used to die every single day of my life. You remember! We all lined up, and there were the athletes standing there with their big chests out, and they’d say, “I choose you” and “I choose you” and you saw the line dwindling away, and there you were, still standing there. Finally it got down to two people, one other little skinny guy and you. And then they’d say, “Okay, I’ll take Buscaglia” or “I’ll take the Wop” and you’d step out of line dying because you were not the image of the athlete, you were not the image of perfection they were striving for. I have a student in class who is a gymnast. He almost made the Olympics last year. He has a club foot. In every other way in this world he is as perfect as you can imagine, a body that would be the envy of anyone, a beautiful mind, fantastic crop of hair, sparkling, alert eyes. But he isn’t a beautiful boy in his perception—-he’s a club foot. Somewhere along the line somebody missed the boat, and all he hears when he walks down the street is the clump of a foot even though no one else is aware of it any longer. But if he sees it, then that’s what he is. So this idea of perfection really turns me off.

But man is always capable of growth and change, and if you don’t believe this, you are in the process of dying. Every day you should be seeing the world in a new personal way. The tree outside your house is no longer the same—so look at it! Your husband, wife, child, mother, father all are changing daily so look at them. Everything is in the process of change, including you. The other day I was on a beach with some of my students, and one of them picked up an old, dried-out starfish, and with great care he put it back in the water. He said, “Oh, it’s just dried out but when it gets moisture again, it’s going to come back to life.” And then he thought for a minute, and he turned to me, and he said, “You know, maybe that’s the whole process of becoming, maybe we get to the point from time to time where we sort of dry out, and all we need is a little more moisture to get us started again.” Maybe this is what it’s all about.

In fact, an investment in life is an investment in change to the end, and we can’t be concerned with dying because we must be too damned busy living! Let dying take care of itself. And don’t ever believe that your life is ever going to be peaceful—life is not like that. With change taking place all around you, you’ve got to continue adjusting which means that you are going to constantly be becoming, there is no stopping. We’re all on a fantastic journey! Every day is new. Every experience is new. Every person is new. Everything is new, every morning of your life. Stop seeing it as a drag! In Japan, the running of water is a ceremony. We used to sit in a little hut when the tea ceremony took place, and our host would pick up a scoop of water and pour it into the teapot, and everybody would listen. The sound of the falling water would be almost overpoweringly exciting. I think of how many people run showers and water in their sinks every single day and have never heard it. When was the last time you listened to rain drops?

Herbert Otto says, “Change and growth take place when a person has risked himself and dares to become involved with experimenting with his own life.” Isn’t that fantastic? A person has risked himself and dared to become involved with experimenting with his own life, trusting himself. To do this, to experiment with your own life, is very exhilarating, full of joy, full of happiness, full of wonder, and yet it’s also frightening. Frightening because you are dealing with the unknown, and you are shaking complacency.

I have a very strong feeling that the opposite of love is not hate—it’s apathy. It’s not giving a damn. If somebody hates me, they must “feel” something about me or they couldn’t possibly hate. Therefore, there’s some way in which I can get to them. If you don’t like the scene you’re in, if you’re unhappy, if you’re lonely, if you don’t feel that things are happening, change your scene. Paint a new backdrop. Surround yourself with new actors. Write a new play. And if it’s not a good play, get the hell off the stage and write another one. There are millions of plays—as many as there are people. Nikos Kazantzakis says, “You have your brush and colors, paint paradise, and in you go.”

A loving person recognizes needs. He needs people who care, someone who cares at least about him, who truly sees and hears him. Again, perhaps just one person but someone who cares deeply. Sometimes it takes only one finger to mend a dike.

I don’t know how many of you have ever seen the play Our Town but one of its most poignant scenes is when little Emily dies, and she goes into the graveyard, and the gods tell her that she can come back to life for one day. She chooses to go back and relive her twelfth birthday. She comes down the stairs in her birthday dress, her curls bouncing, so happy because she is the birthday girl. And Mama is so busy making a cake for her that she doesn’t look up to see her. Papa comes in, and he is so busy with his books and his papers and making his money, that he walks right by, doesn’t even see her. Her brother is in his own scene, and he’s not bothering to look either. Emily finally ends up in the center of the stage alone, in her little birthday dress. She says, “Please, somebody, look at me.” She goes to her mother once again, and she says, “Mama, please, just for a minute, look at me.” But nobody does, and she turns to the gods, if you remember, and her line is something like, “Take me away. I forgot how difficult it was to be a human being. Nobody looks at anybody anymore.”

It’s also about time we started listening to each other. We need to be heard. I used to love the idea of “share and tell” in the classroom. I thought this was a time when people would listen. But, you see, someone told the teachers that they had to have their enrollment slips in by 9:05 so they used this time for share and tell. Little kids went up and said, “Last night my daddy hit my mommy with the rolling pin and knocked out two front teeth, and the ambulance came and took her away, and she’s in the hospital.” And the teacher looked up and said, “All right, who’s next?” Or the little kid came up and showed teacher a rock, “I found a rock on the way to school today.” She said, “Fine, Johnny, put it on the science table.” I wonder what would happen if she picked the rock up and said, “Let me see the rock. Look at that. Kids, look at the color of that rock. Feel it. Who made a rock? Where does a rock come from? What’s a rock? What kind of a rock is this?” I can see how everything could stop all day long, and you could just groove on learning about a rock. But “Put it on the science table.”

And man needs a feeling of achievement. We all do. We’ve got to be able to be recognized for doing something well. And somebody’s got to point it out to us. Somebody has got to come up occasionally and pat us on the shoulder and say, “Wow! That’s good. I really like that.” It would be a miracle if we could let people know what was right rather than always pointing out what is wrong.