There’s this very famous person who is no more embodied, Leo Buscaglia. He lived his entire life, speaking on love and celebrating life. And he used to say, that there was a very strange system in his family.
End of every day, after everybody sits around in the dining table, the father would ask each one, ’What did you learn for the day?’ So, each one has to share something that they have learned today and only then they yearn to eat.
So, incase any one of them in the family says, ‘No, today I learned nothing’,the father used to say that everything can remain on the table, come let’s go and open the Encyclopedia. Let’s learn something new and come back to the table and only then we shall eat.
So, by evening Buscaglia says, me with my siblings, we all used to ask ‘Did you learn anything? otherwise that man will put the food on the plate and not allow us to eat.’ And we used to go and check with our friends, ‘Do you guys have to do anything like this, where they put the food on the plate, then they ask you what do you learnt for the day?
And every day when somebody said ‘No’ in our family nothing happens like this. I used to think they’re all children, Privileged children, of good parents and I used to think I’m a cursed child of a bad father, who does not allow me to enjoy my dinner and every day he demands, I’ll have to tell him, what did you learn for the day. And then Buscaglia says, then a time came, I lost my father, life moved on and wherever I went people used to ask me, ‘How come you know so much?’ Today I’m 71, when he shared this, he was 71. He said today I’m 71 and sometimes I deliver a speech to 20,000 people and they go on a standing ovation.
I must celebrate. I come back to my hotel room, I brush my teeth and I am about to sleep and I can still hear Papa ask me, Felice, his entire name is Leonardo Felice Buscaglia.
People used to call him Leo Buscaglia, an Italian. So his father used to call him by the middle name Felice. He says I’m 71. The sound of 20,000 people giving a standing ovation still echoes in my ears. But one thing has not changed, when I brush my teeth and I come to the bed and I lie down, I can still hear Papa ask me Felice, ‘What did you learn for the day?’
