"Death ends a Life, not a Relationship"

"Death ends a Life, not a Relationship" - 

Morrie Schwartz's last recorded statement in Mitch Albom's book, "Tuesdays with Morrie."

The book is a short, but amazingly moving and inspiring book about what life comes down to. Relationships. 

It was during the reading of this book that I got the idea to start a blog of all the books, knowledge, and insights I have gathered since I started looking outside myself for a greater understanding of life. 

I highly recommend this book. It really puts everything in context. 

A few other Morrie "aphorisms" (I had to look up that word an its pronunciation because I have not used it before.) that I marked in the book because they really resonated as True (meaning ultimate truth - universal and from God).  

• Central theme of the book, "Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.... No one really believes they're going to die." Most of us walk around as if we're sleepwalking. We really don't experience the world fully, because we're half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do. Facing death changes all that. 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. If you really listen to that bird on your shoulder, if you accept that you can die at any time - then you might not be as ambitious as you are. The things you spend so much time on - all this work you have to do - might not seem as important. You might have room for more spiritual things. Spiritual to many means touch-feely stuff, but we are deficient in some way. 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. Being able to walk around outside in the sunshine, running. When Morrie because sick, he started appreciating the window that let him watch the weather and the turning of the trees outside, like he was seeing nature for the first time.
• The most important thing that Morrie learns with his disease (ALS) 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 rationale act. Love is the only rationale act.'"
• Morrie talks about "detachment" as being important for the living and the dying people. Buddhists say don't cling to things because everything is impermanent. Mitch points out that Morrie has always recommended "experiencing life, all the good and bad emotions. Morrie clarifies that detachment doesn't mean you let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate fully, so you are able to leave it. Huh??  "Take any emotion - love for a woman, or grief for a love 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 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.
  
  "But 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 wht pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, 'All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need o detach from that emotion for a moment.'"
  
  Morrie repeats that when you know how to die, you know how to live and describes his fearful moments with the disease, where he loses his breath and isn't sure if the next breath will come. Horror, fear, anxiety. But once he recognized the feel of those emotions, their texture, their moisture, the shiver down the back, the quick flash of heat that crosses your brain - then he was able to say, "Okay, this is fear. Step away, step away from it. Step away."
  
  Mitch reflects on how often this is needed in everyday life. Being lonely to the point of tears, but not letting the tears flow because we are not supposed to cry. Or feeling a sure of love for a partner, but not saying anything because we are frozen with fear of what those words might do to the relationship.
  
  Morrie's approach is the opposite - turn on the faucet. Wash in the emotion. It won't hurt, it will only help. For example, "All right, it's just fear, I don't have to let it control me. I see it for what it is. "  The same for loneliness: you let go, let the tears flow, feel it completely - but eventually be able to say, "All right, that was my moment with loneliness. I'm not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I'm going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I'm going to experience them as well." Detachment.
  
  Morrie also states that he wants to die serenely, not in a state of fright, so he has to learn to find peace and serenity in those frightening moments. He wants to know what's happening, accept it, and get to a peaceful place, and let go.