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Put on your cardigan and your grey New Balance running kicks and hustle on over to the PictureShows to watch this tender masterpiece of humanity.
I’ve written before about the documentary Won’t you Be My Neighbor which was an excellent introduction to the life of Fred Rogers and which I teach in my Zen Rhetoric class; can you spot all the ways Fred Rogers lives his life as a man of Zen?
A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is less about Fred Rogers per se and more about the capacity he had to make people feel safe, seen, and loved. And once you feel safe, seen, and loved, you can make others feel that way too.
Here’s a link to the Esquire essay “Can you say…Hero?” on which A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is based.
Because Fred Rogers embodies what Character By Design is about––ways of deliberately living our lives so that we can free ourselves from the habits that isolate us and trap us in limited, love-inhibiting protective strategies––there’s lot’s more to know about him and lots more for us to study and contemplate. So please read this essay on Fred Rogers the artist and consider how you live your life as a work of art.
Click on photo to go to the article.
4. What is the root of unkindness? Certainty. So if you want to be more like Fred Rogers, be more curious and less certain you know how things are or how they should be. To help you, try saying “Is that so?” to people and situations that disagree with you and report back the results of your experiment.