First Up: Tuesdays with Morrie

Time to revisit

The Book

I recognize most of us were assigned Tuesdays with Morrie in high school or college or some other literary environment. But, in the book world there is a difference between a "book" and a "resource". A book you might read once. A resource, on the other hand, is that book that gets pulled on and off your shelf. That you find yourself referencing and turning to in different stages of life. A book that suddenly has a million more meanings because you are dealing with more or have seen more. I’d argue this is one of those.

So if the last time you read Tuesdays with Morrie was in 10th grade English class, this is your nudge to pick it up again.

The Reminder

The themes of this book are obvious: love, death, aging, purpose, etc. They are the big questions of life. But the reminder that stuck out to me the most this time around is the enduring power of perspective.

Perspective is a funny thing. Most often in conversation “perspective” is used alongside words like “positive”. People are often trying to shift their perspective upwards on a scale from negative to positive. That’s where phrases like “everything happens for a reason” come from - a sense that we are supposed to be willing our outlook to be positive for positivity’s sake.

But the reminder in this book is that perspective is less about ignoring reality and instead it’s about “noticing more of reality”. Morrie is dying and all of the sudden the same trees, outside of the same window are better, more complex, more beautiful. It’s not a cop-out or a frivolous grasp at gratitude. There was no ignoring of his pain, he just allowed his pain to highlight other parts of his life. He noticed more.

And so, it’s simply about having perspective rather than it being a type perspective. The reminder is to look at life from different angles. Zoom in. Zoom out. Look at reality from up high and down low. Perspective pervades this book and it gave me a sort of permission to look at life different ways. The vantage point from which we look at our lives changes most everything, I’m learning.

There’s a quote in the Magician’s Nephew that sums this up well:

“what you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what kind of person you are”.

The Prompt

I think I will be ending these little book reports with a journal prompt. This time the question is: How many elderly people do you regularly interact with in a meaningful way? Who are they and how do they make you feel? Is there something you want to ask them?

There’s something about the wisdom of age that can’t be disputed. The more of life we live, the more we know.

“It’s very simple. As you grow, you learn more. If you stayed at 22 you’d always be as ignorant as you were at 22. Aging is not just decay you know. It’s growth. It’s more than the negative that you are going to die. It’s the positive that you understand you are going to die and that you live a better life because of it.” - Morrie