Living Life Fully’s Daily Pick-Me-Up

Leo Buscaglia is one of my favorite people, mostly because of the amazing passion with which he wrote and spoke, and also because of his amazing focus on love and the beauty and power of each individual on this planet.  Here are a few of his words:

So many people are trying to make us what they want us to be, and after a while we just give up and decide that maybe this is called “adjustment.”  Heaven forbid!  Occasionally, someone will rebel and say, “No!  I will not become what you want me to be.  I am, and I will remain.  I want to become who I am.”

I wonder sometimes:  no matter how we rebel, are we really what we are or are we only what we are told we are?  We know as teachers and psychologists that we learn to be human–and who are our teachers?  First of all, our teachers are our parents, our family.  We can’t any more, unless we are still children, blame our parents and family, because parents and family are only human beings like everyone else.  They have their own problems.  They have their own frailties.  They have their own strengths and their own weaknesses.  They taught us only what they know.  You will finally grow up when you can walk up to the man who is your father or woman who is your mother and say, “You know, with all your hang-ups, I love you.”

A father came to me once after a love class, and he said, “I want to see you.”  He took me out in the back parking lot, put his arms around me, hugged me, and began to cry.  He said, “The other day my son, after twenty-one years said, ‘You know, Dad, I really love you,’ and I know he meant it.  I knew it was there, but you taught him how to say it.”  So we can no longer have any regrets about the fact that we were not taught, or that perhaps we were not always taught adequately.  We can always learn!

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