Joseph Luft

Last month I took at Nonviolent Crisis Intervention course at Holland College. It was training I’d wanted for more than a decade; this was the first chance I’d had to take it locally, and it proved invaluable. I grieve the years I was without it, and handled crises ham-fistedly.

One of the slides in the course slide deck concerned the Johari Window, which looks like this:

The idea is that you choose a number of adjectives from a list to describe yourself,  then have your peers choose adjectives to describe you, from the same list. These adjectives are then placed in the quadrants based on whether each appears on both lists (“Arena”) or one or the other (“Façade” or “Blind spot”).

We didn’t dwell on the concept, but once I got home I looked it up. Who was “Johari,” I wondered?

Johari, it turns out, were Joseph Luft and Harrington Ingham, American psychologists.

As things often happen with me, I hopped into the Johari rabbit hole, and discovered that Luft died in 2014, two days after he turned 98 years old, after being hit by a car:

In a statement Saturday, his family said, “We are mourning the loss of our father and family member, but we are also celebrating his long and healthy life. Joe was the child of immigrants, a World War II veteran, renowned psychologist, proud father of four and beloved local figure. He cherished his daily walks and took them religiously for over 50 years.

“While his death was sudden, he died doing what he loved. We do not yet know the details of what happened, but our hearts go out to the driver of the car and his family during this difficult time.”

Nine months later, the city of Berkeley installed a flashing beacon at the intersection where Luft was killed.

I have thought of Luft often in the month since I came to know of him.