You will always be the second best anyone else. – Leo Buscaglia
Leo, in his book titled: Love, tells an amazing story as it relates to having love for oneself. I intend to give you the very much paraphrased version. He takes you on a visual journey back to grade school. He has you remember the anticipation you held in your little heart and mind over the art teacher coming around to your classroom. It was that time where you got to put down the lead and pick up the oily Crayola. It was time to put method, pragmatism, social order and conformity to rest so as to wake up the wild and the crazy. It was time to do the thing you love. Or, so you thought….
I Don’t Love Your Tree
His story picks up in description of the art teacher drawing a simple tree on the chalk board and instructing the class to follow suit by replicating it on the blank sheet of paper in front of them. Two lines mirrored just inches apart and headed for the top of the page. Lines that lend themselves to branches. And, a line that mimics a camel hump repeated in a circular motion starting on the right and finding itself up and around nearing the top of the page and back down to a point where it intersects with the vertical line on the left. Boom – it’s a tree. Yes – you did it. You and everyone else except for Junior.
You quite presumably know where this is going. Yes – Leo inserts ‘that guy/gal’ into the story. He calls him Junior. And, Junior produces a tree with the love and care that Michael Angelo gave in creating some of the finest art the world has ever seen. The love that a kid gives to choosing his yellow, green, orange and magenta with overtones of red and shades of grey, black and just enough brown. The love that creates the freakiest most awesome and over the top tree that art teacher, the class and the world at large has ever seen. That love that gets shunned, booed, kicked and yeah butted right out of the room. The love that gets you remarks like – I don’t love your tree…
Please Conform
Conformity kicks the teeth right out of love. It asks a maintenance technician to master electricity when plumbing is his first love. It’s asks our best maintenance supervisor to lead the troops to the top of the mountain and into war when tinkering and solving mechanical problems is his first love. It asks our best leasing people to master accounting when servicing people is his/her first love. It’s telling someone who the best way to do something is the way that you do it. Or the way the company does it. Or the way your dad used to do it. It’s the continued ripping of life right out of people the same way it was ripped out of Junior.
Punch Line
Starting today – Don’t give up your tree…
Have a non-conforming weekend,
Your, never giving up my tree, multifamily manic,
M