Revisiting Tuesdays with Morrie

Revisiting Tuesdays with Morrie after like… 10 years? I remember reading this book as a young adult. I didn’t think much of this book back then. I remember skimming through the topics. It didn’t interest me much. Looking back after 10 years. I start to understand that this book talks about the essentials in life.

The read started with friends talking about this book. And just so coincidently, another friend gave me a copy of a DVD version. I had no reason not to read it. What stunned me was how well this book portraits the normal lives of normal people so vividly. Our day-to-day lives which seems absolutely normal to us would seem to Morrie, out of track. He would question the social norm, shouting, “What’s wrong with being number two?!” Or dance Tango in a disco hall just because he liked to do that and ask, “What’s wrong with that?” He doesn’t believe in following the tide, he believes that he is part of the tide. “If the culture is wrong, don’t buy it!”

Another important lesson I learnt from this lovely professor is that we need to live at the present. If we are with a person, be with that person. Pay full attention to him. This applies to work as well.

And sometimes you know, when I feel sad or don’t feel good about myself, I tend to shrug the feeling away, as if it makes me weak. Morrie, on contrary, encourages us to soak in those bad feelings. “Let them in completely”, he would say. Then detach. And he calls that living. I learnt that I need to be true to myself, and that includes my feelings.

Another thing I took from the old professor is: Love goes around, comes around, and you know what? Love is all that matters. As Morrie quotes Auden, “We must love, or perish.”

Talking about dying, Morrie taught me that learning to die is synonym to learning to live. Acknowledging death gives us a reality check that our time is limited. Most of us never think about this and believe that we have all the time in the world. Thus I learn to use my time more wisely, cutting down my daily activities to bare essentials.