About Love and Family
The fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn't the family. It's the family. It's become quite clear to me as I've been sick. 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".
Sure, people would come visit, friends, associates, but it's not the same as having someone who will not leave. It's not the same as having someone whom you know has an eye on you, is watching you the whole time.
Detachment
Don't cling to things, because everything is impermanent.
Detachment doesn't mean you don't let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That's how you are able to leave it.
Take any emotion - love for a woman, or grief for a loved 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're 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 yourselves into these emotions, by allowing yourselves 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 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 to detach from that emotion for a moment."
Die & Live
I want to die serenely. Peacefully. Not like what just happened.
I'm an independent person, so my inclination was to fight all of this - being helped from the car, having someone else dress me. I felt a little ashamed, because our culture tells us we should be ashamed if we can't wipe our own behind. But then I figured, Forget what the culture says. I have ignored the culture much of my life. I am not going to be ashamed. What's the big deal?
Youth & Aging
All this emphasis on youth - I don't buy it.
Listen, I know what a misery being young can be, so don't tell me it's so great. All these kids who came to me with their struggles, their strife, their feelings of inadequacy, their sense that life was miserable, so bad they wanted to kill themselves. And in addition to all the miseries, the young are not wise. They have very little understanding about life. Who wants to live every day while you don't know what's going on?
Mitch, I embrace aging.
It's very simple. As you know, 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.
Question 1: Yes, I said, but if aging were so valuable, why do people always say, " oh, if I were young again." You never hear people say, "I wish I were sixty-five."
He smiled, " You know what that reflects? Unsatisfied lives. Unfulfilled lives. Lives that haven't found meaning. Because if you've found meaning in your life, you don't want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more. You can't wait until sixty-five."
"Listen. You should know something. All younger people should know something. If you're always batting against getting older, you're always going to be unhappy because it will happen anyhow."
The fact is, you are going to die eventually.
It won't matter what you tell yourself.
But hopefully, not for a long, long time.
Question 2: I'm wondering how you don't envy younger, healthy people.
Oh, I guess I do. I envy them being able to do to the health club, or go for a swim. Or dance. Mostly for dancing. But envy comes to me, I feel it, and then I let it go. Remember what I said about detachment? Let it go. Tell yourself, "That's envy, I'm going to separate from it now." And walk away.
But the issue is to accept who you are and revel in that.
You have to find what's good and true and beautiful in your life as it is now.
Looking back makes you competitive. And age is not a competitive issue.
Mitch's Understanding
Morrie's approach was exactly the opposite. Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won't hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, "All right, it's just fear, I don't have to let it control me. I see it for what it is."
"All right, that was my moment with loneliness. I'm not afraid of feeling lonely, but how 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."
Summer's Thoughts
Grabbing every moment I have is the most desirable thing to do. I've always been afraid of my age. When I decided to take the post graduate examination, families around me said that I am old enough to have a good job and then get married. I can't. I have the urgent desire to study more. Till now, I don't know whether the desire is from my heart or social values. It must be achieved or I will think about it over and over again. But I have learned one most important thing from Morrie - let then emotion around you fully and then let it go.
If I am sad, I cry; if I am happy, I laugh; if I am envious, I hate my backwards, I am learning to feel every emotion, record it and forget it. Let life go towards a better one.
