Saturday, January 26, 2013

Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

  • Do I wither up and disappear, or do I make the best of my time left?
  • The word "dying" was not synonymous with "useless."
  • I felt as if time were suddenly precious, water going down an open drain, and I could not move quickly enough.
  • I buried myself in accomplishments, because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things, I could squeeze in every last piece of happiness before I got sick and died, which I figured was my natural fate.
  • Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do.
  • Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it.
  • Learn to forgive yourself and to forgive others.
  • Don't assume that it's too late to get involved.
  • Dying is only one thing to be sad over.  Living unhappily is something else.
  • The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves.  We're teaching the wrong things.  And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it.  Create your own.
  • Life is a series of pulls back and forth.  You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else.  Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't.  You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.  A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band.  And most of us live somewhere in the middle.
  • Love wins.  Love always wins.
  • So many people walk around with a meaningless life.  They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important.  This is because they're chasing the wrong things.  The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
  • If you really want it, then you'll make your dream happen.
  • He couldn't understand why both sides didn't simply communicate with each other and solve their problems.
  • Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.
  • The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.
  • Why are we embarrassed by silence?  What comfort do we find in all the noise?
  • I give myself a good cry if I need it.  But then I concentrate on all the good things still in my life.
  • How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity.
  •  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.
  • There's a better approach.  To know you're going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time.  That's better.  That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you're living.
  • Do what the Buddhists do.  Every day, have a little bird on your shoulder that asks, 'Is today the day?  Am I ready?  Am I doing all I need to do?  Am I being the person I want to be?'
  • Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.
  • Most of us all walk around as if we're sleepwalking.  We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.
  • Even I don't know what 'spiritual development' really means.  But I do know we're deficient in some way.  We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don't satisfy us.  The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.
  • There is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn't the family.  If you don't have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don't have much at all.  Love is so supremely important.
  • Without love, we are birds with broken wings.
  • If you want the experience of having complete responsibility for another human being, and to learn how to love and bond in the deepest way, then you should have children.
  • Don't cling to things, because everything is impermanent.
  • 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.  I recognize that emotion.  Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.'
  • Turn on the faucet.  Wash yourself with the emotion.  It won't hurt you.  It will only help.  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."
  • The truth is, when our mothers held us, rocked us, stroked our heads--none of us ever got enough of that.  We all yearn in some way to return to those days when we were completely taken care of--unconditional love, unconditional attention.  Most of us didn't get enough.
  • I know what a misery being young can be, so don't tell me it's so great.  All these kids who came to me with their struggles, their strife, their feelings of inadequacy, their sense that life was miserable, so bad they wanted to kill themselves.  
  • And in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise.  They have very little understanding about life.  Who wants to live every day when you don't know what's going on?  When people are manipulating you, telling you to buy this perfume and you'll be beautiful, or this pair of jeans and you'll be sexy--and you believe them!  It's such nonsense.
  • 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've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back.  You want to go forward.  You want to see more, do more.  You can't wait until sixty-five.
  • It is impossible for the old not to envy the young.  But the issue is to accept who you are and revel in that.
  • You have to find what's good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now.  Looking back makes you competitive.  And, age is not a competitive issue.
  • How can I be envious of where you are--when I've been there myself?
  • We put our values in the wrong things.  And it leads to very disillusioned lives.
  • We've got a form of brainwashing going on in our country.  Do you know how they brainwash people?  They repeat something over and over.  And that's what we do in this country.  Owning things is good.  More money is good.  More property is good.  More commercialism is good.  More is good.  More is good.  We repeat it--and have it repeated to us--over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise.  The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what's really important anymore.
  • You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for a sense of comradeship.
  • When you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have.
  • There's big confusion in this country over what we want versus what we need.  You need food, you want a chocolate sundae.  You have to be honest with yourself.  You don't need the latest sports car, you don't need the biggest house.  The truth is, you don't get satisfaction from those things.  You know what really gives you satisfaction?  Offering others what you have to give.
  • This is how you start to get respect, by offering something that you have.
  • If you're trying to show off for people at the top, forget it.  They will look down at you anyhow.  And if you're trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it.  They will only envy you.  Status will get you nowhere.  Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone.
  • Love is how you stay alive, even after you are gone.
  • He looked you straight in the eye, and he listened as if you were the only person in the world.  How much better would people get along if their first encounter each day were like this--instead of a grumble from a waitress or a bus driver or a boss?
  • I believe in being fully present.  That means you should be with the person you're with.
  • So many people with far smaller problems are so self-absorbed, their eyes glaze over if you speak for more than thirty seconds.  They already have something else in mind--a friend to call, a fax to send, a lover they're daydreaming about.  They only snap back to full attention when you finish talking, at which point they say "Uh-huh" or "Yeah, really" and fake their way back to the moment.  Part of the problem is that everyone is in such a hurry.  People haven't found meaning in their lives, so they're running all the time looking for it.  They think the next car, the next house, the next job.  Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running.
  • Once you start running, I said, it's hard to slow yourself down.
  •  In this culture, it's so important to find a loving relationship with someone because so much of the culture does not give you that.  But the poor kids today, either they're too selfish to take part in a real loving relationship, or they rush into marriage and then six months later, they get divorced.  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.
  • There are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage.  If you don't respect the other person, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.  If you don't know how to compromise, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.  If you can't talk openly about what goes on between you, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.  And if you don't have a common set of values in life, you're gonna have a lot of trouble.  Your values must be alike.  And the biggest one of those values, your belief in the importance of your marriage.
  • I thought about how much time we spend trying to shape our bodies, lifting weights, crunching sit-ups, and in the end, nature takes it away from us anyhow.
  • People are only mean when they're threatened, and that's what our culture does.  That's what our economy does.  Even people who have jobs in our economy are threatened, because they worry about losing them.  And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself.  You start making money a god.  It is all part of this culture.
  • Here's what I mean by building your own little sub-culture.  I don't mean you disregard every rule of your community.  I don't go around naked, for example.  I don't run through red lights.  The little things, I can obey.  But the big things--how we think, what we value--those you must choose yourself.  You can't let anyone--or any society--determine those for you.
  • No matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is our shortsightedness.  We don't see what we could be.  We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become.  But if you're surrounded by people who say 'I want mine now,' you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it.
  • 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.
  • We all have the same beginning--birth--and we all have the same end--death.  So how different can we be?  Invest in the human family.  Invest in people.  Build a little community of those you love and who love you.
  • Don't let go too soon, but don't hang on too long.
  • Be compassionate.  And take responsibility for each other.  If we only learned those lessons, this world would be so much better a place.
  • Forgive yourself before you die.  Then forgive others.
  • You can't get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened.
  • Death ends a life, not a relationship.
  • There is no formula to relationships.  They have to be negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like.
  • Love is when you are as concerned about someone else's situation as you are about your own.
  • Pay attention when your loved ones are speaking, as if it were the last time you might hear them.
  • None of us can undo what we've done, or relive a life already recorded.
1/25/2013

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