📚 Tuesdays with Morrie

May 14, 2022

Knowledge that we know but easily forget…

“If the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.
Create your own.”

“I may be dying, but I am surrounded by loving, caring souls.
How many people can say that?”

“Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel.
And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them too -
even when you’re in the dark.
Even when you’re falling.”

“Once you learn how to die,
you learn how to live.”

“So once again, I dove into work.
I worked because I could control it.
I worked because work was sensible and responsive.”

“Yes. Detaching myself.
And this is important - not just for someone like me, who is dying, but for someone like you, who is perfectly healthy.
Learn to detach. […] Don’t cling to things, because everything is impermanent.”

“But detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you.
On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully.
That’s how you are able to leave it.”

“Take any emotion - love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I’m going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness.
If you hold back on the emotions - if you don’t allow yourself to go all the way through them -
you can never get to being detached, you’re too busy being afraid.
You’re afraid of the pain, you’re afraid of the grief.
You’re afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.”

“But by throwing yourself into these emotions,
by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even,
you experience them fully and completely.
You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is.
And only then can you say,
‘All right. I have experienced that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.’ “

“We all know how to be a child.
It’s inside all of us.
For me, it’s just remembering how to enjoy it.”

“It’s very simple.
As you grow, you learn more.
If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two.
Aging is not just decay, you know.
It’s growth.
It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.”

“If you’re always battling against getting older,
you’re always going to be unhappy,
because it will happen anyhow.”

“Devote yourself to loving others,
devote yourself to your community around you,
and devote yourslef to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”

“And love is how you stay alive,
even after you are gone.”

“And if you want to cry a little, it’s okay.”

“They don’t know what they want in a partner.
They don’t know who they are themselves -
so how can they know who they’re marrying?”

“I’ve learned this much about marriage. You get tested.
You find out who you are, who the other person is, and how you accommodate or don’t.”

“Invest in the human family.
Invest in people.
Build a little community of those you love and who love you.”

“As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had,
we can die without ever really going away.
All the love you created is still there.
All the memories are still there.
You live on - in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.”

“Death ends a life, not a relationship.”

“In business, people negotiate to win.
They negotiate to get what they want.
[…] Love is different.
Love is when you are as concerned about someone else’s situation as you are about your own.”

‘None of us can undo what we’ve done, or relive a life already recorded.
But if Professor Morris Schwartz taught me anything at all, it was this:
there is no such thing as “too late” in life.
He was changing until the day he said good-bye.’ - Mitch Albom

Like many others, I couldn’t wait to grow up and become independent. I wanted to become financially free and travel while finishing an enormous pile of KitKat bars by myself. My desire to become independent caused me to become focused on achieving milestones - at the cost of forgetting the values that bring joy to my life.

Reading this memoir made me remember the feelings I had when I was younger.
The feeling of being dependent.
It’s not a bad feeling.

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