Below are things that struck me along the way. I wanted to post this not to add my number of blogs but to keep my self reminded of the good values and teachings.
The First Tuesday We Talk About the World
- “The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.”
- “Let it come in. We think we don’t deserve love, we think if we let it in we’ll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. He said, ‘Love is the only rational act.’”
- "Why are we embarrassed by silence? What comfort do we find in all the noise?" -Morrie
The Second Tuesday We Talk About Feeling Sorry for Yourself
- “I give myself a good cry if I need it. But then I concentrate on all the good things still in my life."
- The activity: "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."
The Third Tuesday We Talk About Regrets
- “We will hold hands,” Morrie said. “And there’ll be a lot of love passing between us. Ted, we’ve had thirty-five years of friendship. You don’t need speech or hearing to feel that.”
- The great teacher, in pain, because of his mother's death: “Morrie,” Koppel said, “that was seventy years ago your mother died. The pain still goes on?” “You bet,” Morrie whispered. (Me: got teary-eyed)
The Professor
- The good stepmother: Eva would accept nothing less than excellence in school, because she saw education as the only antidote to their poverty. (This just sound like Mama)
- The diligent Morrie: He studied at night, by the lamp at the kitchen table. And in the mornings he would go to synagogue to say Yizkor—the memorial prayer for the dead—for his mother. He did this to keep her memory alive.
- For years, the only evidence Morrie had of his mother was the telegram announcing her death. (And I love the part where his the one reading it like a student reciting a poem in front of the class)
- “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.” -Henry Adams
The Fourth Tuesday We Talk About Death
- How can you ever be prepared to die? “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.”
- You strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials. When you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently. 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.
- “Yes. I look out that window every day. I notice the change in the trees, how strong the wind is blowing. It’s as if I can see time actually passing through that windowpane. Because I know my time is almost done, I am drawn to nature like I’m seeing it for the first time.”
The Fifth Tuesday We Talk About Family
- “Love each other or perish.” Without love, we are birds with broken wings.
- "-knowing that your family will be there watching out for you. Nothing else will give you that. Not money. Not fame"
- ‘There is no experience like having children.’ There is no substitute for it. You cannot do it with a friend. You cannot do it with a lover.
The Sixth Tuesday We Talk About Emotions
- Learn to detach.
- Don’t cling to things, because everything is impermanent. -Buddhists
- “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."
- Morrie’s approach was exactly the opposite. 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 Professor, Part Two
- During the days of healthy Morrie: One of the patients, a middle-aged woman, came out of her room every day and lay facedown on the tile floor, stayed there for hours, as doctors and nurses stepped around her. Morrie watched in horror. Every day, she did the same thing: came out in the morning, lay on the floor, stayed there until the evening, talking to no one, ignored by everyone. It saddened Morrie. He began to sit on the floor with her, even lay down alongside her, trying to draw her out of her misery. Eventually, he got her to sit up, and even to return to her room. What she mostly wanted, he learned, was the same thing many people want—someone to notice she was there.
- Morrie observed that most of the patients there had been rejected and ignored in their lives, made to feel that they didn’t exist. They also missed compassion—something the staff ran out of quickly. And many of these patients were well-off, from rich families, so their wealth did not buy them happiness or contentment. It was a lesson he never forgot.
The Seventh Tuesday We Talk About the Fear o f Aging
- “It’s like going back to being a child again. Someone to bathe you. Someone to lift you. Someone to wipe you. We all know how to be a child. It’s inside all of us. For me, it’s just remembering how to enjoy it."
- “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."
- At seventy-eight, he was giving as an adult and taking as a child.
- “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.”
- “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 to be a wise old man. Think of all I can be! I am every age, up to my own. Do you understand?”
- “How can I be envious of where you are—when I’ve been there myself?”
- “Fate succumbs many a species: one alone jeopardises itself.” -W.H. Auden, Morrie’s favorite poet
The Eighth Tuesday We Talk About Money
- When people die, you always hear the expression “You can’t take it with you.” Morrie seemed to know that a long time ago.
- These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can’t substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.
- “There’s a big confusion in this country over what we want versus what we need,”
- “I don’t mean money, Mitch. I mean your time. Your concern. Your storytelling."
- Ways to have a meaningful life: Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
- “Mitch, 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.”
- “Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn.” -Mahatma Gandhi
The Ninth Tuesday We Talk About How Love Goes On
- Aphorism: “When you’re in bed, you’re dead.”
- Life lesson: Learning to pay attention? How important could that be? I now know it is more important than almost everything they taught us in college. -Mitch
- “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.”
- “The truth is, I don’t have to be in that much of a hurry with my car. I would rather put my energies into people.”
- The closer he gets to good-bye, the more he seems to feel we are all creatures in the same forest.
- What we take, we must replenish.
The Tenth Tuesday We Talk About Marriage
- I brought a visitor to meet Morrie. My wife. (This may be nothing but when I read this I felt butterflies flying in my stomach)
- “It’s sad, because a loved one is so important. You realize that, especially when you’re in a time like I am, when you’re not doing so well"
- "Friends are great, but friends are not going to be here on a night when you’re coughing and can’t sleep and someone has to sit up all night with you, comfort you, try to be helpful.”
- “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."
- “Your belief in the importance of your marriage.” -Biggest one of those values
- “I think marriage is a very important thing to do, and you’re missing a hell of a lot if you don’t try it.”
- “Love each other or perish.”
- Story: "There were a bunch of sociologists at the university, and we used to play poker with other staff members, including this guy who was a surgeon. One night, after the game, he said, ‘Morrie, I want to come see you work.’ I said fine. So he came to one of my classes and watched me teach. “After the class was over he said, ‘All right, now, how would you like to see me work? I have an operation tonight.’ I wanted to return the favor, so I said okay. “He took me up to the hospital. He said, ‘Scrub down, put on a mask, and get into a gown.’ And next thing I knew, I was right next to him at the operating table. There was this woman, the patient, on the table, naked from the waist down. And he took a knife and went zip just like that! Well … Morrie lifted a finger and spun it around. “… I started to go like this. I’m about to faint. All the blood. Yech. The nurse next to me said, ‘What’s the matter, Doctor?’ and I said, ‘I’m no damn doctor! Get me out of here!’”
The Eleventh Tuesday We Talk About Our Culture
- “People are only mean when they’re threatened, and that's what culture does." -Morrie
- “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.”
- "We all have the same beginning—birth—and we all have the same end—death."
- “In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive, right? And at the end of life, when you get like me, you need others to survive, right?” His voice dropped to a whisper. “But here’s the secret: in between, we need others as well.”
- Story: As “The Trial of the Century” reached its dramatic conclusion, my old professor was sitting on the toilet.Story: It is 1979, a basketball game in the Brandeis gym. The team is doing well, and the student section begins a chant, “We’re number one! We’re number one!” Morrie is sitting nearby. He is puzzled by the cheer. At one point, in the midst of “We’re number one!” he rises and yells, “What’s wrong with being number two?” The students look at him. They stop chanting. He sits down, smiling and triumphant.
- Aphorism: “Don’t let go too soon, but don’t hang on too long.”
- Aphorism: “Love each other or die.”
The Twelfth Tuesday We Talk About Forgiveness
- “Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others.”
- “There is no point in keeping vengeance or stubbornness. These things”—he sighed—”these things I so regret in my life. Pride. Vanity. Why do we do the things we do?”
- Morrie to Mitch: “If I could have had another son, I would have liked it to be you.”
- Morrie to Mitch: “Tell you what. After I’m dead, you talk. And I’ll listen.”
The Thirteenth Tuesday We Talk About the Perfect Day
- Last sentence in the recorder: “Death ends a life, not a relationship.”
- One perfect day: “Let’s see … I’d get up in the morning, do my exercises, have a lovely breakfast of sweet rolls and tea, go for a swim, then have my friends come over for a nice lunch. I’d have them come one or two at a time so we could talk about their families, their issues, talk about how much we mean to each other. “Then I’d like to go for a walk, in a garden with some trees, watch their colors, watch the birds, take in the nature that I haven’t seen in so long now. “In the evening, we’d all go together to a restaurant with some great pasta, maybe some duck—I love duck and then we’d dance the rest of the night. I’d dance with all the wonderful dance partners out there, until I was exhausted. And then I’d go home and have a deep, wonderful sleep.” (That's simplicity)
- Story: “Okay. The story is about a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time. He’s enjoying the wind and the fresh air—until he notices the other waves in front of him, crashing against the shore. “‘My God, this is terrible,’ the wave says. ‘Look what’s going to happen to me!’ “Then along comes another wave. It sees the first wave, looking grim, and it says to him, ‘Why do you look so sad?’ “The first wave says, ‘You don’t understand! We’re all going to crash! All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn’t it terrible?’ “The second wave says, ‘No, you don’t understand. You’re not a wave, you’re part of the ocean.’” I smile. Morrie closes his eyes again. “Part of the ocean,” he says, “part of the ocean. “
The Fourteenth Tuesday We Say Good-bye
- “Touched me …” he whispered. He moved my hands to his heart. “Here.” It felt as if I had a pit in my throat. Coach? “Ahh?” I don’t know how to say good-bye. He patted my hand weakly, keeping it on his chest. “This … is how we say … good-bye …” He breathed softly, in and out, I could feel his ribcage rise and fall. Then he looked right at me. “Love … you,” he rasped. I love you, too, Coach.
- I blinked back the tears, and he smacked his lips together and raised his eyebrows at the sight of my face. I like to think it was a fleeting moment of satisfaction for my dear old professor: he had finally made me cry.
Graduation
- Finally, on the fourth of November, when those he loved had left the room just for a moment—to grab coffee in the kitchen, the first time none of them were with him since the coma began—Morrie stopped breathing.
- November 4, 1994 - Tuesday
- Tombstone: A Teacher to the Last
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