Leo F. Buscaglia,
Ph.D
Who
is the loving person? The loving
person is the person who loves him or herself. I say this so often, and people
say, “Oh, yes, you’re so right,” but they just don’t do it! You will never be able to love anybody
else until you love yourself.
Wiesel, the wonderful Jewish writer, wrote a beautiful thing in a book
called Soul on Fire. He said:
When
we die and we go to heaven, and we meet our Maker, our Maker is not going to say
to us, why didn’t you become a messiah?
Why didn’t you discover the cure for such and such? The only think we’re going to be asked
at that precious moment is why didn’t you become you?
That
is your prime responsibility, because if it were not, why is that you are so
incredibly unique? Everybody is
different. Everybody has something
to give that nobody else in the world has.
Isn’t that enough for you to become enthusiastic about yourself? And also, to say to yourself, “My
goodness, I’ve got to find out what that is.”
I
tell that to my students, and they say, “Me? I don’t have anything useful.” Well, if
you believe it and you listen to everyone else, they may convince you that
that’s true. I don’t understand why
people are always putting us down instead of encouraging us to become, because
when you do become, you will give me a world that I couldn’t have any other way.
I’m probably tin the Guinness Book of
Records for hugging. Do you know that there are no two people that even hug
alike? You have the gentle hugger
who sort of floats in your arms. You have the jock hugger goes rrhhhooowww. You
have the back-slapper that goes Bam! Bam! Bam! You have the tender lover that
just disappears in you and then wiggles.
Don’t tell me that it ever gets boring to hug!
But one of the most difficult things you’re going to have to do—it should
be the simplest—is to be you, to find
out who you are and what you have to share. And then dedicate yourself to the
process of developing it so that you can give it away to everybody else, because
that’s the only reason in the world for having anything. The wonderful thing about the self is
that it isn’t anything that’s concrete.
The thing that you’ll leave behind is something that’s not tangible. That’s what you are. And if you develop that, you’ll leave
that to everyone you touch. And they’ll be more.