tuesdays with Morrie - A Book review

Tuesdays with Morrie  by Mitch Albon is one of the most beautiful book I have read. 

Its a charming little story about a old professor who is slowly losing his body to ALS (the disease which Stephen Hawking suffers from). In this disease the muscles slowly starts to degenerate and eventually you have no muscles left. As the author says in the book "while your soul is perfectly awake, its imprisoned inside a limp husk". So you must be wondering what is so beautiful about this book, for that you have to read it to experience it.

Let me try to tell a little more about the book. Morrie was the author's favorite professor in college and the author revered him. But as it tends to be, the author lost touch with Morrie until he came to know about his terminal state. Thus began every Tuesday an impromptu lecture about life in general between the author and his old professor. They talked about family, marriage, money, emotions, forgiveness so on and so forth.

And they turned out to be the authors greatest lectures ever.

Some of the random conversations/aphorisms that I liked from the book.

1. "So many people walk around in a meaningless life. They seem half asleep even when they are busy doing things they think are important. This is because they are chasing the wrong things.

The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to the community around you and devote yourself to create something that gives you purpose and meaning."

2. "Once you learn how to die, you learn how to live."

3. "Don't cling to things because everything is impermanent."

4. "The biggest problems humans have is shortsightedness. We dont see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential stretching ourselves into everything we can become."

5. "Its just not other people we have to forgive, we also need to forgive ourselves, For all the things we did not do, for all the things we should have done. You cant get stuck on the regrets of what should have happened."

This book should be made mandatory at school level, but we live in a country where the approach to teaching is so erroneous. Most of the things we are taught in school and colleges hardly teaches you anything.  I think we all need a lesson in humanity which seems to be so prevalently absent in people today. 

But then again I digress, whatever your age may be start reading this book today and you will learn to appreciate your life a lot more and find pleasure back in the simple things in life and hope you implement a thing or two from the book.