Living, Loving & Learning by Leo F. Buscaglia

Living, Loving & Learning by Leo F. Buscaglia

Author:Leo F. Buscaglia [Buscaglia, Leo F.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780913590881
Google: FXaLf3L9t90C
Publisher: C.B. Slack
Published: 1982-11-15T00:34:39.618551+00:00


Tomorrow’s Children

I’m excited about your conference theme. I think you feel with me that it’s kind of ludicrous and crazy to set aside one year as the Year of the Child. Every year should be a Year of the Child and it’s about time that we recognize it. Maybe this will start the thing rolling, and we can move together recognizing that children desperately need us. The concept of the child, Tomorrow’s Child—Lover or Loser, is what I’m here to talk about with you.

I’d like to start by reading a passage by Anthony Storr from his marvelous book called, The World of Children. He says we are all children even if most of us have forgotten it. I think it would be nice if we could get back in touch with what it was like in the beginning of this process, when we were all first brailling the world. Seeing your first tree. Everyone of us had to go through the process of finding our first flower and rediscovering fire. It’s a long process and we’re still involved in it, or I hope we are. We’re still brailling the world. It’s not enough for us to see a tree, but we want to climb it, we want to smell it, we want to hug it, we want to taste it, we want to chew it, we want to truly experience it. And that’s what gives life its marvel and its magic. But Storr says this:

How ignominious it is to be a child. To be so small that you can be picked up, to be moved about at the whim of others. To be fed or not to be fed. To be cleaned or to be left dirty. Made happy or left to cry. It’s surely so ultimate an indignity that it’s not surprising that some of us never really recover from it. For it is surely one of the basic fears of personkind that we should be treated as things and not as persons. Manipulated, pushed around by impersonal forces, treated as of no account by the powerful and more superior. Each one of us may be a tiny atom in an enormous universe, but we need the allusion that we count—that our individuality demands attention. To be able to be totally disregarded as a person is a kind of death in life against which we are compelled to fight with all of our strength.

I think those of us who are in the helping professions know, perhaps more than anybody else, how hard it is to find that self, to maintain that self and to be able to stand up and say not “I am,” but “I am becoming,” for in reality, in so many ways, we are not even born yet. And still, as far as I know, there is no school for life and there are damn few models—people who can truly stand up and say, “I am becoming, I am. It’s wonderful. Life is good, the world is beautiful.



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