Tuesdays With Morrie - A professor's last lessons

Recently I had the privilege to read a wonderful book titled ‘Tuesdays with Morrie’ by Mitch Albom. Initially I was little skeptical about the book thinking this would be another of those ‘self-help’ books from the American stable. However, since it was discussed in the Corporate Ethics class, I thought I would give it a try. While it may read like a typical ‘self-help’ one, it is a true story and is not a feel-good type. The author, Mitch, did have a college professor Morrie Schwartz who had got this rare disease named Lou Gehrig’s disease and was dying a slow death. Mitch spent 14 Tuesday with his beloved professor in his last few months of life and chronicled what the professor of sociology had to say about life, love, death and many other topics based on his own experiences and learning. The book has been adapted for a movie by the same name and you can listen to some of the original recordings of the conversation between the author and his professor at http://www.albom.com/video.html.

To me, the book was more like a reminder rather than new lessons. When we live, we live as if we are never going to die and waste a lot of time in petty things and do not enjoy the time we have on this earth. And when it is time for us to die, we are never prepared, we have too many things ‘yet to do’, ‘yet to experience’ etc. It would be interesting to ask oneself, ‘what if today is the day for me to go? Would I still be doing what I am doing now? While talking about ‘Emotions’, the professor says, often we don’t let our emotions show because we think that would be silly. But, that stops us from experiencing the natural emotions that God has given us and we are stopping the flow. And only by letting the emotions run, we can really detach ourselves from these emotions. Detaching oneself from the experience or emotion does not mean that we don’t experience them, rather we soak in them and understand their true meaning.

On the topic of aging, some interesting perspectives have been thrown in. I think many of us age unmindful of the fact that we are aging. Then suddenly we discover a bigger bald patch on the back of our head or a friend makes a comment on how one looks, that we become momentarily conscious of the fact. We should be unhappy about aging if aging did not make us any wiser. If we are as ignorant at 32 as we were at 22, well, we should have stayed at 22. But, if we can understand life better and appreciate it more at 32, should we still remain at 22?

What do we mean by wholesome living? Is it a life where all our material needs are fulfilled and we have all the money and all the toys that we care for? Or is it a life full of love, a life which is devoted to the community around and a life that creates something positive? The answer is obvious when questioned but we rarely think about it. We are in a permanent hurry and we are never in the moment, always looking for the next big thing that is going to happen to us. Morrie explains how he used to wave and smile at people who wanted to get ahead of him in traffic.

People become mean when they feel threatened. This is something I have experienced many times and continue to experience even at campus. Life seems like a zero sum game; if someone else gets something, means I am not getting it. I have to deprive someone of something so that I can have it. We go about life with this mentality most of the time. However, the truth is that the feeling you get when one gives something to someone, is many times more fulfilling than the feeling one gets when consuming the same. We need each other to feel good and feel happy and we cannot build this community with fear and greed. Thus goes another one of Morrie’s dialogue with Mitch.

The last part of the book talks about forgiving, others and more importantly self, for things that one should have done but could not do. One has to make peace with living so that we can make peace with death. All of us have to die, its natural. But, we don’t die like plants and animals. Because as humans, we have relationships and relationships live on, our memories live on, of course, only if we have loved and built relationships over the years. When Morrie is asked what he would do if he had a healthy 24 hours, Morrie does not wish for anything extraordinary or fantastic but, just a nice breakfast, walk in the nature, spending time with friends, having a nice dinner at a restaurant and dancing away the night and then have a good, deep sleep. Just an ordinary day but how many such ordinary days we spend without really appreciating what we have and what could be taken away with a stroke of bad luck.

I wish many more of us will read this book and get reminded to love, laugh and live.