Bozos on the Bus

"We're all bozos on the bus,
so we might as well sit back
and enjoy the ride."
-WAVY GRAVY

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 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, kids, or terrorism to wrinkled skin and receding hairlines. In other words, we're all bozos on the bus.

This is, in my opinion, cause for celebration. If we're all bozos, then for God's sake, we can put down the burden of pretence and get on with being bozos. We can approach the problems that visit bozo-type beings without the usual embarassment and resistence. 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. It's 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 somthing 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 aboard. 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 so 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. -Elizabeth Lesser, Broken Open, p. 27-29.

Easy to appreciate, hard to remember and keep in mind. Today at work a co-worker lost it on the conveyor (which has happened to all of us at one time or another). He was cursing and bitching about how terrible patrons are, etc. I felt compassionate towards him, helped him clear the enormous backlog of returned books that set him off. Yes, I felt compassionate and understanding, but I also felt a bit superior to him, so calm and collected, observing his histrionic emotional display over some ridiculous, minor and predictable incident. A few hours later, I was on the conveyor myself, and was merrily checking books in, when suddenly I noticed a bunch of work that should have been done by the previous worker but wasn't. My mood shifted instantly; suddenly it was my turn to curse and act like a two-year-old throwing a tantrum. After a while I calmed down enough to find this amusing. I love these little lessons from the universe, especially when I feel like I'm so together and then I get tripped up. Yeah, I love them, I really really do. Or at least...they're useful.

I'm still smarting a bit from a comment a new friend of mine made recently. I was at her place and we were looking at my profile online, when the following piece of dialog occured:

Me: Do you think that's a good picture of me?
She: Well, you're a fat, bald guy, and that picture shows what you look like.

Uh, thanks. I actually didn't seem to have much of a reaction to it at the time, but following my conveyor tantrum today I went into a brief period of self-loathing, all kinds of negative shit looping around in my cranium. Most unpleasant, but fortunately pretty rare these days. I do notice this delayed emotional reaction effect on my part a lot; I wonder what that's all about? I think it's a sign of repression or dissociation, both of which I used to do a lot more than I do at present, but there's obviously some lingering aspect of that, and this seems to be a sign of it.

That's the second time in a short period this woman has thoughtlessly blurted out things that hurt my feelings. Oh well. It's a bozo manoever for sure, but it's not like I've never done that. At least this type of thoughtless hurtful comment indicates that I can trust her to say what's on her mind.