143 I love you
Fred Rogers.
1 is how many letters there are in the word I, 4 is the number of letters in love and 3 is the number of letters in you.
This Christmas I took the time to see “It is a beautiful day in the neighborhood” where Tom Hanks plays Fred Rogers a Minister turned children’s television presenter. A very popular, and loved man in the USA that I must admit I had never heard of before I saw the film.
Truthfully, I had no idea what the film was about, I chose to see it because Tom Hanks was in it. As I thought then it couldn’t be all bad, as it turns out it was one of those films that stayed with me.
Minister Fred Rogers is portrayed in the movie as a person whose intentions are to make people feel good about themselves, to make them feel important and that they are okay just the way they are. That there are no feelings that they are not allowed to have and that cannot be shared.
During the movie, Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers, speaks very slowly and practices a verbal taekwondo that turns all attention away from Fred and onto the person he talks to.
He uses his technique to get to understand and help the other person and to me sometimes it even felt a bit unethical because he had not been invited to do so.
At some point during the movie I stopped it because dinner was ready and during dinner we would comment on the film, we agreed that we found the character Fred Rogers a bit creepy, we were waiting for a turn of events because no one is this good a person.
After dinner we put the film back on and we changed our minds, Fred Rogers was no longer creepy, his intentions were genuine and good.
What made me change my mind was when Tom Junod, played by Matthew Rhys, who is writing an article about Fred Rogers for the Esquire magazine, asks Fred Rogers’ wife Joanne Rogers, played by Marielle Heller, how is it to live with a saint?
She answers, I am just quoting from memory, something like: “Fred would actually dislike the word saint, as he is not, he works very hard at being who he is every day”
That for me was the clue that Fred Rogers’ kindness and intentions were good and not some obscure curiosity of getting into people’s lives where he had not been invited.
As Tom Hanks put it in his interview with Savannah Guthrie on Today, Fred Rogers used his verbal taekwondo to meet people with compassion and to lead with vulnerability.
Where his kindness was his vulnerability, where vulnerability is the opposite of being cynical.
And it wasn’t just my own cynicism that was waiting for a turn of events?
We know now that being kind to others is one of the important ingredients to our own happiness.
Tom Hanks tell us in the interview he gives to Gayle Kind from CBSN about the film, that on his daily scripts there would be a quote for Fred Rogers, some long and some short. And one of them said:
The three rules for happiness are:
- Be Kind
- Be kind
- Be kind.
I hope you are as happy as you would like to be and remember it is free to be Kind.
Best wishes
Ivalo