“Don’t Walk in My Head with Your Dirty Feet”

“Don't walk in my head with your dirty feet.”
― Leo Buscaglia, Living, Loving & Learning

I just finished reading Living, Loving, & Learning by Leo Buscaglia, who was a professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Southern California. I enjoyed the book very much, and I think it would greatly benefit society if we could all read it and apply the teachings inside.

In the book, Leo Buscaglia tells the story of traveling to Japan and meeting with his “marvelous Japanese teacher” in a garden of giant bamboo. Buscaglia had learned many things in his travels and search for wisdom, and so he was excitedly sharing all of this with his teacher. He kept going on and on, wanting to impress his teacher with all that he knew.

Suddenly, the normally very peaceful teacher struck Buscaglia in the mouth, and he said:

“Don’t walk in my head with your dirty feet.”

I have had the experience of the Japanese teacher many, many times, where I felt like someone was introducing unhelpful and unnecessary, and perhaps even hurtful thoughts to me. And sometimes, these people go on and on. And I can’t really get away, not tactfully, anyway. I may feel stuck, at the mercy of this person’s wandering and untrained mind.

Different ways that people may walk in my head with their dirty feet are if they go on and on in a way that is angry, hateful, bitter, negative, boastful, worried, obnoxious, overly dramatic, self-obsessed, and so on.

In my life, my mind does sometimes experience negativity, and I may discuss that and introduce it to the world at times, but either I aim to keep it concise and be done with it, or I aim to teach others how to overcome those negative thoughts and experiences. Of course, no one is perfect, but I feel that this is better than rambling on with negativity and introducing it to others around me without any purpose behind it.

Of course, even if someone does “walk in my head with their dirty feet,” I would not strike them because of that. But I suppose the teacher in the story above wanted to make the emphatic point that if Buscaglia thought he knew so much, he should know better than to brag and ramble, especially when they were surrounded by beautiful scenery and a peaceful environment. And the teacher himself must know more than the student in this case, so perhaps Buscaglia should have been open and listening, rather than imposing his own thoughts.

This month I’ve been thinking of how we often let people walk in our head with their dirty feet. I think we invite it in. On the ride to my wife’s workplace, I often turn on the radio. And either it’s music that I don’t even like, or it’s about car crashes that have clogged the roadways, or some other bad news about how things are getting worse. Otherwise, if I get on social media or check the news, I seem to be inviting people or ideas into my head as well, often with their dirty feet.

Lately, instead of dealing with the radio, we sometimes ride our bikes together (with no radios), or I turn off the radio, and we either talk or sit in silence. It’s not so bad.

I’m making an effort to be more at ease with the silence. It seems most of us find the silence undesirable and prefer to have an endless chatter in the background, whether it may come from the TV, social media, or even the people we surround ourselves with. The reality is that often, these are not providing us with helpful and positive messages. They are the dirty feet of today. Ultimately, we tend to invite it in because we find the silence unbearable.

We seem to prefer dirty feet in our heads, over the silence. But it should be the other way around.

The silence may remind us of our own feet, which are often dirtier than anything else. By this, I mean that in silence, our mind wanders negatively, self-destructively, perhaps. This is especially true for the untrained mind (I discuss how we can train our mind in many ways in this post.). And so, in efforts to avoid our own feet or untrained thoughts in all their dirtiness, we tend to invite others to walk in our heads with their own dirtiness.

Books are a great resource for me because if they introduce ideas that I think have a dirtiness, where they are unnecessary, hurtful, irrational, wrong, or charged with negative emotions, I can close the book and move on.  

If I’m online and start reading negative comments on a social media page, I sometimes feel compelled to keep going and keep inviting more of these dirty feet into my mind. I don’t know why, I can’t explain it, but it happens. Once I get started, it’s hard to quit. I find it’s best to avoid it altogether.

Instead of getting sucked into all the unnecessary negativity, I believe it is important to stay positive.

And none of this even accounts for the advertisements that find us everywhere we go. They instill fear, worry, anxiety, depression, whereas they claim to be fixing these things.

Sometimes on the radio, I hear something like this in an overly concerned tone. “Have you been suffering from A and B symptoms? (Imagine any common symptom such as headaches or stomachaches.) Then they claim that it could be more serious than you think. Then they go on about how they can save you from your chronic illness with a particular medication they are selling.

Talk about “dirty feet.”

One day when that happened, I told my wife – “I really have to change the station at this point. There is plenty to worry about in this world, without me needing to think that a minor and common symptom could be a chronic and serious illness. Obviously, if we feel unwell, we see a doctor. I do not need a commercial to make me worried about my health.”

As another example, often politicians focus on all the ways that the “other party” is ruining the world, which provides us with a stampede of dirty feet. I often hear of the idea that either this party or that party, or this country or that country, or these people or those people, or this idea or the other idea, or this belief or the other are ruining the world. This is on such a regular occurrence that it seems normal. Certainly, these are dirty feet that have invaded our minds.

So, how can we wash our feet, metaphorically speaking? How can we wash ourselves of this emotional pain, harm, and negativity that we tend to spread onto others?

Maybe it’s a phrase worth stating more often – “Don’t walk in my head with your dirty feet.” Maybe that can help us to stay cleaner and teach people to be more cautious with the thoughts and words that they choose to share.

I’m retraining myself to say things in my mind like, “It’s no big deal.”

Sometimes I have this sense of urgency of needing to check my emails over and over because someone might send me a message. And I need to remember, “It’s no big deal.”

Do I really need an inbox of 20-30 messages per day? It’s like dust building up in my home. Now, I find that I respond less often. I mark more messages as spam if they are indeed spam. I unsubscribe from lists more often if I don’t really care about the messages. I used to get back to people on the same day. Now, I tend to take 4-5 days or sometimes more. It’s not because I don’t have the time. It’s because nothing is that urgent. The vast majority of the time, nothing is “that big of a deal.”

The world somehow finds the way to keep orbiting the sun, regardless of what we do.

I can’t think of a single email I’ve received in the last 5 years where it truly needed to be answered within 24 hours. Sure, in some cases, not answering quickly enough could have cost me a bit of money or inconvenienced someone, but it would never have led to some great catastrophe. It would never have really mattered in the grand scheme.

Even in the few times, someone may have contacted me about a dire problem in their life, often people resolve those problems on their own, or new problems arise and they forget about the old ones. I wouldn’t be so egocentric as to think that someone truly needed my advice at a particular moment to save them. I may have helped, but I imagine their lives would have continued without me. If nothing else, they would have found someone else to give them advice if they truly needed it at that moment.

Today, think of how you can wash your feet and how you can keep them clean.

It may be as simple as holding back a bit and questioning whether you really need to state everything on your mind. Will some of those things add needless worry, fear, desperation, or sadness to the people around you?

To make a true, long-lasting change, it may help to meditate, self-reflect, or otherwise look to make a positive change in your life. These can be changes that you work on implementing gradually if that is easier for you.

And also, think of how you can keep other people’s dirty feet out of your head.

Can you leave an environment, or if this often happens with someone, can you tactfully tell him that he is not helping with his comments? And perhaps, he is making things worse.

Today, let’s keep our feet clean so that we do not dirty the minds of the people around us. And let’s encourage others to keep their feet clean, so they do not dirty our minds.