Bozos on the Bus

I am flying in the face of blogging etiquette here, for what I am about to share is not something from my own mind or hand at all, but rather something I have just read in a book. But it is worth sharing, in my opinion, as I found it to be incredibly refreshing, raw, and oddly liberating, not to mention it made me laugh out loud. It is a short chapter from the book Broken Open, by Elizabeth Lesser. She is a brilliant writer and her chapter in this book titled Bozos on the Bus demonstrates her skill and her humor.

I believe we are on a beautiful journey here, everyday being given opportunities to explore and express our own magnificence and beauty. Yet we all reach points in the road where we stumble, feel discouraged, downright scared, or hopeless. It is part of the human experience. Elizabeth so comedically and honestly captures this aspect of our human being-ness that I had to share. Enjoy!

Elizabeth opens the chapter by introducing the clown-activist Wavy-Gravy whose quote inspired this chapter. Says Wavy-Gravy, "We're all bozos on the bus so we might as well sit back and enjoy the ride."

Again, these are Elizabeth Lesser's words, not mine:

"One of my heroes is the clown-activist Wavy-Gravy. He is best known for a role that he played in 1969, when he was the master of ceremonies at the Woodstock festival. Since then, he's been a social activist, a major "fun-d"-raiser for good causes, a Ben & Jerry's ice-cream flavor, an unofficial hospital chaplain, and the founder of a camp for inner-city kids. Every four years he campaigns as a candidate for president of the United States, under the pseudonym Nobody, making speeches all over the country with slogans like "Nobody for President," "Nobody's Perfect," and "Nobody Should Have That Much Power." He's a seriously funny person, and a person who is serious about helping others. "Like the best of clowns," wrote a reporter in The Village Voice, 'Wavy Gravy makes a big fool of himself as is necessary to make a wiser man of you. He is one of the better people on earth.'

But my all-time favorite Wavy-ism is the line that opens this chapter, about bozos on the bus, one he repeats whenever he speaks to groups, whether at clown workshops or in children's hospitals. I have co-opted the phrase, and I use it to begin my workshops, because I believe that we are all bozos on the bus, contrary to the self-assured image we work so hard to present to each other on a daily basis. We are all half-baked experiments--mistake-prone beings, born without an instruction book into a complex world. None of us are models of perfect behavior: We have all betrayed and been betrayed; we've been know to be egotistical, unreliable, lethargic, and stingy; and each one of us has, at times, awakened in the middle of the night worrying about everything from money, kids, or terrorism to wrinkled skin and receding hairlines. In other words, we're all bozos on the bus.

This, in my opinion, is cause for celebration. If we're all bozos, then for God's sake, we can put down the burden of pretense and get on with being bozos. We can approach the problems that visit bozo-type beings without the usual embarrassment and resistance. It is so much more effective to work on our rough edges with a light and forgiving heart. Imagine how freeing it would be to take a more compassionate and comedic view of the human condition--not as a way to deny our defects but as a way to welcome them as part of the standard human operating system. Every single person on this bus called Earth hurts; it's when we have shame about our failings that hurt turns into suffering. In our shame, we feel outcast, as if there is another bus somewhere, rolling along on a smooth road. Its passengers are all thin, healthy, happy, well-dressed, and well-liked people who belong to harmonious families, hold jobs that don't bore or aggravate them, and never do mean things, or goofy things like forget where they parked their car, lose their wallet, or say something totally inappropriate. We long to be on that bus with the other normal people.

But we are on the bus that says BOZO on the front, and we worry that we may be the only passenger onboard. This is the illusion that so many of us labor under--that we're all alone in our weirdness and our uncertainty; that we may be the most lost person on the highway. Of course we don't always feel like this. Sometimes a wave of self-forgiveness washes over us, and suddenly we're connected to our fellow humans; suddenly we belong.

It is wonderful to take your place on the bus with the other bozos. It may be the first step to enlightenment to understand with all of your brain cells that the other bus--that sleek bus with the cool people who know where they are going--is also filled with bozos; bozos in drag, bozos with secrets. When we see clearly that every single human being, regardless of fame or fortune or age or brains or beauty, shares the same ordinary foibles, a strange thing happens. We begin to cheer up, to loosen up, and we become as buoyant as those people we imagined on the other bus. As we rumble along the potholed road, lost as ever, through the valleys and over the hills, we find ourselves among friends. We sit back, and enjoy the ride."

Reference: Broken Open; How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow, by Elizabeth Lesser. Bozos on the Bus, page 27.