Bozos on the Bus

From Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow
by Elizabeth Lesser

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We're all bozos on the bus
so we might as well sit back
and enjoy the ride
- Wavy Gravy
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One of my heroes is the clown-activist Wavy Gravy.  He is best known for being master of ceremonies at the Woodstock festival in 1969.  His contention is that we all have our frailties and vulnerabilities, but can fall down and skin our knees and still come up smiling.  He appears to be unafraid of looking silly.

He is also a master of one-liners, my all-time favorite being the one above about bozos on the bus, one he repeats whenever he speaks to groups, whether at a clown workshop or in a children's hospital.  I use this phrase 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 all been known 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 to kids to 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 of welcoming 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 an 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 never 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 normal people.

But here we are on the bus that says BOZO on the front, and we worry that we may be the only passenger on board.  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 heart that the other bus - that sleek bus with the cool people who know where they're going - is also filled with bozos - bozos in drag, bozos with a secret.

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 can sit back and enjoy the ride.

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Well worth a click:  Elizabeth Lesser talks to Wendy Schuman of BeliefNet about being Broken Open.
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Elizabeth Lesser is cofounder of Omega Institute, the leading educational center for holistic health, psychology, arts, and spirituality. Lesser has studied with renowned teachers like the Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra, Thich Nhat Hanh, Ram Dass, and many others who have come to Omega. In the 1970s, she lived in a spiritual community and worked as a midwife. The mother of three and author of two books (her first was "The Seeker's Guide"), Lesser teaches workshops on spiritual transformation. 

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Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.
- Kathleen Casey Theisen
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