Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom

This is a great non-fiction book written by Mitch Albom about his professor. His professor, Morrie, suffered from ALS, which cause his body to slowly became unable to move, and die. He learned about his long lost contract professor through the interview screened on the TV. Soon he and his professor reunioned and they started their 14 life lessons started on every Tuesdays.

1st Tuesday: About the World
-- The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it
come in."
-- Love is the only rational act.

2nd Tuesday: About Feeling Sorry for Yourself
-- I thought about all the people I knew who spent many of their weking hours feeling sorry for themselves. How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity. Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day.

3rd Tuesday: About Regrets
-- The culture doesn't encourage you to think about such things until you're about to die. We're so wrapped up with egotistical things, career, family, having enough money, meetinf the mortgage, getting a new car, fixing the radiator when it breaks--we're involved in trillions of little acts just to keep going. So we don't get into the habit of standing back and looking at our lives and saying, Is this all? Is this all I want? Is something missing?
-- You need someone to probe you in that direction. It won't just happen automatically.
-- We all need teachers in our lives.

4th Tuesday: About Death
-- To know you're going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time. That's better. That way you can actually be more involved in your live while you're living.
-- 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?'
-- Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live.

5th Tuesday: About Family
-- The fact is, there is no foundation, no ssecure 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'

6th Tuesday: About Emotions
-- Don't cling to things, because everything is impermanent.
-- But 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.
-- 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... ... 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.

7th Tuesday: About the Fear of Aging
-- ... ... embrace aging.
-- As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at twenty-two, you'd always be as gnorant 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.
-- If you're always battling against getting older, you're always aoing to be unhappy because it will happen anyhow.

8th Tuesday: About Money
--Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I'm sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feelinf you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have.
-- Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.
-- ... if you're trying to show off for other people at the top, forget it. They will look down at you anyhow. And if you're trying to show off for people at the bottom, forget it. They will only envy you. Status will get you nowhere. Only an open heart will allow you to float equally between everyone.
-- Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I reborn. [Mahatma Gandhi]

9th Tuesday: About how Love goes on
-- ... ... everyone is in such a hurry. People haven't found meaning in their lives, so they're running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find those things are empty, too, and they keep running.
-- I would rather put my energies into people.

10th Tuesday: About Marriage
-- In this culture , it's so important to find a loving relationship with someone beacause so much of culture does not give you that. But the poor kids today, wither they're too selfish to take part in a real loving relationship, or they rush into marriage and then six months later, they get divorced. They don't know what they want in a partner. They don't know who they are themselves--so how can they know who they're marrying?
-- ... ... there are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don't respect the other person, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don't know how to compromise, you gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can't talk openly about what goes on between you, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don't have a common set of values in life, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values in life must be alike.

11th Tuesday: About Our Culture
-- The little things, I can obey. But the big thins-- how we think , what we value--those you must choose yourself. You can't let anyone--or any society--determine those for you.
-- Look, no matter where you live, the biggest defect we human beings have is short sightedness. We don't see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can becom. But if you're surrounded by people who say 'I want mine now,' you end up with a few people with everything and a military to keep the poor ones from rising up and stealing it.
-- In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive, right? And at the end of life, when you get like me, you need others to survive, right? ... ... But here's the secret: in between, we need others as well.

12th Tuesday: About Forgiveness
-- Make peace. You need to make peace with yourself and everyone around you.
-- Forgive yourself. Forgive others. Don't wait, ... ...
-- The tension of the opposites... ... Things pulling in different directions.

13th Tuesday: About the Perfect Day
-- Everything gets born, dies.
-- As long as we love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on--in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you here.
-- Death ends a life, not a relationship.

14th Tuesday: We say Good-Bye