Tag: Robert Fulghum

Laughter is the wrench we use to loosen anxiety. [Article]

Bob Fulghum is moving, & writes about the experience. Read part 1 and part 2

Moving is like molting – your exoskeleton gets shed for a new skin. Moving is like migrating – new pastures – new opportunities. Moving numbs the mind and soul, and excites the imagination at the same time.

and then this

Yesterday, in a mind-numbing moving-and-storage funk, I went for a drive alone. In search of serenity, I visited my best Seattle real estate investment. I own it free and clear – no mortgage, no taxes, no obligations to it. 

It’s a hole in the ground, actually – about the size of an old-fashioned telephone booth laid on its side – and covered, for now, in grass.  This is my cemetery plot. In Lake View Cemetery on Capitol Hill.

In the middle of the middle [Article]

Robert Fulghum has another interesting view at life, through the eyes of a rag-tag bunch of 13 year olds

You will always be caught somewhere in the middle between where you’ve been and where you’re going, between what you have and what you want. It’s called Now – and it isn’t a place, it’s a condition.

Flowers & Soup – A short story

There was an old man who went every day to the same café in a small town to have soup for lunch. 
He said it was the very finest soup he had ever eaten, and it had increased his life expectancy. 
When the old man finally died, there was a funeral with the usual elaborate gifts of flowers from his friends.

The man who ran the café, however, brought a huge pot of soup. “How can you insult the dead in this way?” asked the mourners. “Well,” said the cook, “he is as likely to taste the soup as he is to smell your flowers, and, besides, you all can take home some of the soup in his honor and eat it. 
Perhaps you will live longer because of it. 
He did.”

From that day forward, the people of that town brought soup to funerals and sent flowers to the living. 


The best marriage advice I’ve ever read. I repeat, Ever. [Article]

Old Bob Fulghum had me hooked to his writing when I was 16; when I read “Uh oh” from cover to cover instead of listening to an accountancy lecture on ‘double entry system of bookkeeping’. One of my favourite people (not just authors), Fulghum has some advice about marriage to his beloved god-daughter – and universally applicable to anyone contemplating marriage (or who’s already married). “Attend to your marriage, not your wedding.”