It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you’d always be as ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you’re going to die, it’s also the positive that you understand you’re going to die, and that you live a better life because of it.
All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.
There are no random acts…We are all connected…You can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind…
Sacrfice,” the captain said. “You made one. I made one. We all made them. But you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost. You didn’t get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to.
You can feel the whole world and still feel lost in it. So many people are in pain– no matter how smart or accomplished–they cry, they yearn, they hurt. But instead of looking down on things, they look up, which is where I should have been looking, too. Because when the world quiets to the sound of your own breathing, we all want the same things: comfort, love and a peaceful heart.
We all have the same beginning – birth – and we all have the same end – death. So how different can we be?
I give myself a good cry if I need it. But then I concentrate on the good things still in my life. I don’t allow myself any more self-pity than that. A little each every morning, a few tears, and that’s all.
Dying is only one thing to be sad over. Living unhappily is something else.
Because if you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward.
Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one.
Sacrifice is a part of life. It’s supposed to be. It’s not something to regret. It’s something to aspire to.
She put one hand on mine. “When someone is in your heart, they’re never truly gone. They can come back to you, even at unlikely times.
It’s not contagious, you know. Death is as natural as life. It’s part of the deal we made.
Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it.
His eyes were more sunken than I remembered them, and his cheekbones more pronounced. This gave him a harsher, older look – until he smiled, of course, and the sagging cheeks gathered up like curtains.
In order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did and why you no longer need to feel it.
Morrie,” Koppel said, “that was seventy years ago your mother died. The pain still goes on?”“You bet,” Morrie whispered.
There are some mornings when I cry and cry and mourn for myself. Some mornings, I’m so angry and bitter. But it doesn’t last too long. Then I get up and say, ‘I want to live..’ ‘So far, I’ve been able to do it. Will I be able to continue? I don’t know. But I’m betting on myself I will.’ Koppel seemed extremely taken with Morrie. He asked about the humility that death induced.
I hope you never hear those words. Your mom. She died. They are different than other words. They are too big to fit in your ears. They belong to some strange, heavy, powerful language that pounds away at the side of your head, a wrecking ball coming at you again and again, until finally, the words crack a hole large enough to fit inside your brain. And in so doing, they split you apart.
..And because he was still able to move his hands – Morrie always spoke with both hands waving – he showed great passion when explaining how you face the end of life.
I made such a fool of myself,” she lamented.
“Love does not make you a fool.”
“He didn’t love me back.”
“That does not make you a fool, either.”
“Just tell me …” Her voice cracked. “When does it stop hurting?”
“Sometimes never.
The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.
That’s what we’re all looking for. A certain peace with the idea of dying. If we know, in the end, that we can ultimately have that peace with dying, then we can finally do the really hard thing. Which is? Make peace with living.
What a waste.. All those people saying all those wonderful things, and Irv never got to hear any of it.
Yet he refused to be depressed. Instead, Morrie had become a lightning rod of ideas.
But she wasn’t around, and that’s the thing when your parents die, you feel like instead of going in to every fight with backup, you are going into every fight alone.
Instead, he would make death his final project, the center point of his days. Since everyone was going to die, he could be of great value, right? He could be research. A human textbook. Study me in my slow and patient demise. Watch what happens to me. Learn with me.
The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish’.
I thought about the days i had handed over to a bottle..the nights i can’t remember..the mornings i slept thru..all the time spent running from myself.
No life is a waste,” the Blue Man said. “The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we’re alone.
Sharing tales of those we’ve lost is how we keep from really losing them.
Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another.
There is no point in keeping vengeance or stubbornness. These things” -he sighed- “these things I so regret in my life. Pride. Vanity. Why do we do the things we do?
Morrie Schwartz
Be compassionate … and take responsibility for each other. If we only learned those lessons, this world would be a better place.
.. when all this started, I asked myself, ‘Am I going to withdraw from the world, like most people do, or am I going to live?’ I decided I’m going to live – or at least try to live – the way I want, with dignity, with courage, with humour, with composure.
Love like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.