Tuesdays With Morrie

Ok, I've been writing this for a while now, but only just decided to finish it and post it. Laziness got the better of me :P

Tuesdays With Morrie is an amazing book!

I was crying and laughing and understanding and learning. This is a book for reading. Seriously, everyone should read it. Morrie Schwartz was and incredible man (it's a true story, by the way). His views on life and love and especially death, are so close to us. It's personal but also unifying. He makes you think without you knowing that he's doing it.

I would love to have had the chance and privilege to meet him. To talk to him and ask him things just to hear how he perceives it. Mitch Albom was one lucky man, to have been able to see him at his best, and worst too. To want to see him live longer and yet to want to see his suffering end. The tension of opposites.

This book covers everything from life, love, family, marriage, culture, death and more. It's not a book that tells you what to do or how to do it. It's not a book for you to scan through, hoping to find an immediate cure for your problems. It's a book to make you think and rethink. To help you evaluate yourself and open up to new ideas. It's a book to help you conquer fear - not show you how to do it but to prove to you that it is entirely possible, that's it's scary but not all that impossible.

Mitch Albom wrote it out all so beautifully and when he describes Morrie's character, how his smile lights up a room, how he listens to you like nothing else matters, how you can see him dancing even though he can no longer move his body. Morrie was a great teacher, too. He can even teach through the pages of a book after leaving this world 16 years ago. Imagine that.

I think the best way to show you what I've learnt from this book is to quote some of the passages in it.

• “The problem, Mitch, is that we don’t believe we are as much alike as we are. Whites and Blacks, Catholics and Protestants, men and women. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.”
• “If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, “All right, it’s just fear, I don’t have to let it control me. I see it for what it is.”
• "Take my condition [He has ALS]. The things I am supposed to be embarrassed about now - not being able to walk, not being able to clean myself, waking up some mornings and wanting to cry - there is nothing innately embarrassing about them. It's the same for women not being thin enough, or men not being rich enough. It's just what our culture would have you believe. Don't believe it."
• "The truth is, part of me is every age. I'm a three-year-old, I'm a five-year-old, I'm a thirty-seven-year-old, I'm a fifty-year-old. I've been through all of them, and I know what it's like. I delight in being a child when it's appropriate to be a child. I delight in being a wise old man when it's appropriate being a wise old man. Think of all I can be! I am every age, up to my own. Do you understand?"
• "Love each other or perish."

Morrie is a smart man, and he gets to me. He lives life not caring about opinions and neither does he rush through it. He savours his life, not attaching himself to the outer world the way we do. We are dependant, Morrie isn't. He always chooses positivity. He might take some time when he wakes up in the morning but he gets there eventually. Morrie chooses to have good days. He knows that he is the only one who can control what he feels and he does that by embracing life, with all its glory and darkness.

It's not about imitating Morrie and his beliefs. It's about finding your own beliefs that are uncontaminated with that of the general world. Finding who you are and sticking to that no matter what because you are in control of your own mind. Why give in to the norms when you can be just the way you are?

Morrie Schwartz, a man, a teacher, a true human being.