Tuesdays with Morrie and My Fuller Life

For the first quarter century of my life I almost never read books for pleasure or to find meaning.  I basically only read books required for school and while I found plenty of them interesting, it never felt like I was reading for myself.  I learned a couple years ago when reading the amazing book Punished by Rewards that when people feel controlled or manipulated into certain behaviors that it diminishes the internal motivation to engage in those behaviors on their own.  Forced into reading for my own educational good and to obtain a degree made the idea of self directed reading out of the question.  For those who are interested, Dan Pink and Ken Robinson (also here) provide more clarity on these and similar issues.

In spite of my stunted motivation about reading, I was inspired by some friends in the late 1990's to read the book Tuesdays with Morrie.  The book is about a series of conversations exploring the meaning of life between a dying teacher (Morrie) and his former student (Mitch).  Reading this book was one of the most important decisions I have made in my life.  I realize that is a lofty statement and it might involve me being overly romantic about the importance of the past decisions, but it was a very critical book to me.  Based on how much I enjoyed the book it put me on a path to engage in self directed reading from that point forward.  The result has been dozens of books (probably over 100) that have made my life more interesting, meaningful, and pleasurable.

This book also made me realize how much I want to be both a student and teacher in the classroom of life.  There are so many mysteries about life that I want to explore endlessly: love, death, friendship, fear, joy, anticipation, humor, tragedy, etc.  I have and want to continue to learn about these and other aspects of life from teacher/mentors, family/friends, co-workers/students, and books/videos.  Just as important to me is to teach the lessons I have learned to others and to explore these types of issues in trusted partnerships where the lines of student and teacher are blurred.  In the book Morrie was the teacher and Mitch was the student, and most days the relationship stayed that way, but it was clear that Morrie was learning along with Mitch and I have often had that same experience in my personal and work life.

While exploring the amazing Ted Talks of Brene Brown and her book The Gifts of Imperfection I found myself again thinking of Tuesdays with Morrie.  One of Dr. Brown's key research findings is that we have to make ourselves vulnerable enough to experience all emotions, including the best and worst feelings life has to offer.  If we numb ourselves from what hurts we also numb ourselves to happiness and joy.  Her research is pretty clear that you cannot just experience the highs of life and avoid the lows.  It is all or nothing.  Morrie shared a similar message when discussing emotions with  Mitch:

"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 in.  You know what grief is.  And the only thing you can say, 'All right, I have experienced that emotion.  I recognize that emotion.  Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.'"

Another important thread in the book is the topic of death.  As I noted in this earlier post, I have had a long standing fascination with death.  "Everybody knows they're going to die," Morrie said, "but nobody believes it.  If we did, we would do things differently." He later added "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?'"  He hammers home the point by saying

"learn how to die, and you learn how to live."

Tuesdays with Morrie has given me the priceless gift of a fuller life.  It challenged the way I experience emotions, it gave me the strength to cry again, it caused me to embrace a life long purpose of teaching and learning, and introduced me the endless gifts found in books.  Most important it caused me to enjoy and find meaning in the daily ride of life as much as possible.