Tuesdays with Morrie

I’ve always found it ironic that the most profound, most poignant books that I ever read tend to be small…slim tomes, only around two hundred pages or so, fit in your pocket, and not one of those massive, hard bound, thick volumes with five hundred or more pages of tightly spaced text, using a lot of big words. I must have been reading the wrong books.

Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie is one of those books that fall in the former category. Plain and simple in its language, yet highly moving, weighty and insightful, it teaches us a lot about the human experience. About the world we live in… self pity… regrets… death… family… emotions… aging… money… love… marriage… culture… forgiveness… the perfect day… and saying goodbye.

It doesn’t happen that often, but I have to rank this book high among my personal all time favorites, alongside Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Scott Adams’ The Dilbert Principle, and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.

The book is pretty simplistic and straightforward, as most profound things are, as only now I’m starting to realize. Mitch Albom learns that his old college mentor, Morrie Schwartz, with whom he lost contact with for sixteen years, had been diagnosed with a terminal case of Lou Gehrig’s disease. He seeks him out…and together…for every Tuesday that followed, they talk about life…from a dying man’s point of view. As Morrie said, “once you learn to die, you’ll learn how to live.”

The book is so full of wonderful and oh so true aphorisms that I have quoted or paraphrased a few below:

“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.”

“The most important thing in life is to learn to give out love, and to let it come in. Love is the only rational act.”

“Love each other or perish.”

“If you’re trying to show off for people at the top, forget it. They will only 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.”

“Still, there are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don’t respect the other person…If you don’t know how to compromise…If you can’t talk openly about what goes on between you…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 marriage.”

Those are the only ones that come into mind right now, but there are a lot more…a whole lot more in the book. To be perfectly honest, “Tuesdays with Morrie”struck a chord with me. Our individual human existence is so fragile…so limited…so short. I guess the supreme irony is that once we finally figured out how to live…we’re just about ready to die. But we can always learn a lot from those who went before us. The same way we will probably pass something on before our turn comes up. Reminds me of my own parents, who I probably…scratch the “probably”…who I don’t appreciate enough. Maybe my experiences have made me hard…hard enough to forget. I don’t know. I really don’t.

Enough said, read the book.

"Love each other or perish."
"We must love one another or die."

- Wystan Hugh Auden