Tuesdays with Morrie: 3 Takeaways
“If you're trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. They will look down on 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.”
― Mitch Albom
The theme of Tuesdays with Morrie can be summed up in a phrase: live while you’re dying. It’s one of those books that puts things in perspective. It provides bits of advice you think about throughout the day then suddenly you find yourself texting your wife, thanking her for a great life.
Morrie Schwartz is a beloved college professor dying of ALS. His former student, Mitch Albom, is nose-deep into a successful career as a journalist when he hears about Morrie’s diagnosis. Mitch makes the 700-mile trek from Detroit to Massachusettes every Tuesday to spend time with Morrie and soak up as much wisdom as possible. It sounds like a movie plot where the 78-year-old teaches the 37-year-old as much as he can as he slowly withers away. (Apparently, it was a movie with 71% on Rotten Tomatoes.)
With only two chapters left in the book, it was like the book itself jumped up and hit me in the face. I got a call from my mom who told me that a neighbor and friend of the family had died suddenly. He was someone I really admired. He had a personality mix of confidence and comfort. He was always happy and always made you feel like he was interested in only you when you spoke. He had many similarities to Morrie.
Soon after I learned about his death I was looking through a different lens. I felt even more apathetic than usual to the latest breaking news and gossip. I felt an urge to reach out to my parents and wife just to establish an immediate connection. And I felt 192 pages of wisdom from Tuesdays with Morrie in a period of minutes. The timing of the book and the death were coincidental and unfortunate but they turned out to be a beautiful way to send a message of the importance of living like you’re dying, especially in the name of others who no longer have the opportunity to.
I miss you, Joe.
1. Detach From The Emotion
“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.’”
Sometimes it sounds like Morrie was Buddha. Attachment, within this context, is when a person is hijacked by their emotions. It’s linked to the subtle nature of miserable people to the extremes of war and genocide. The ability to detach, in addition to Morrie's separate advice to be compassionate and responsible for one another, has the ability to completely upend society.
Practice detaching now. While we could all use this on a minute-by-minute basis, there will be a time when we can desperately benefit from it later in life. Maybe we’ll get cancer or lose someone close to us and then wonder how anyone can cope with this. Detachment is a step in that positive direction. But if you wait to use it when you desperately need it, you’re not going to be able to use it. It’s like teaching someone to swim when they’re drowning. You don’t yell “now keep your fingers together and kick your legs!” as they’re in extreme stress and helplessly flailing.
Practice now for practical implementation later.
2. Embracing Aging
Morrie’s thoughts on aging are refreshing in a society obsessed with looking for the fountain of youth.
“It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed as ignorant as you were at twenty-two, you'd always be 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 the positive that you understand you're going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.”
Mitch pushed back on this mindset by saying that no one ever wants to repeat their old years. Everyone wants to be 18 again, not 65 again.
“You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven't found meaning. Because 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.”
3. How To Have A Lot Of Trouble With Marriage
Morrie is public and extraverted while his wife is not. She doesn’t come into the picture much in the book but at one point the author states that the only time Morrie holds back on saying something is when it’s about his wife whose introversion and privacy he seems to want to respect.
He and his wife were married for 44 years. He boiled those years down to these “rules” on 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…..”
The biggest one of those values: “your belief in the importance of your marriage.”
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