tuesdays with Morrie...

So as this Thanksgiving break starts coming to an end, I look back at how I've spent my time and the emotions I've embraced.  I cried, I laughed, I smiled, I was happy and I was sad.  I thought of memories in the past, some good, and some bad.  Some of the best memories I have, have been when I've embraced more than one emotion.  Emotions can be frustration and overwhelming, but they can also bring lots of happiness and joy if we can find that balance where your emotions can't control you're life.  I finished the wonderful book "tuesdays with Morrie" for a third time tonight.  Every time I read his words I feel myself grow.  When I read this book I cry. I laugh. I reminisce. I wonder, and I try and practice what I've just read.  These are the wonderful quotes that touched me this go round:     

"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/man, 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 yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself 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...then you can let go, let the tears flow, feel it completely, then it won't control you." 
I feel I do this pretty well. Sometimes too much.

"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."

Although I'm only twenty-three years old,  I feel this describes me very well and this is what I hope I feel when I'm in my eighties:
"The truth is, part of me is every age.  I'm a three-year-old, I'm a five-year-old, I'm a thirty-seven-year-old, I'm a fifty-year-old.  I've been through all of them, and I know what it's like.  I delight in being a child when it's appropriate to be a child.  I delight in being a wise old man when it's appropriate to be a wise old man.  Think of all I can be!  I am every age, up to my own."

 Being fully present..how often are you really in the present? 
"I believe in being fully present..That means you should be with the person you're with.  When I'm talking to you now, I try to keep focused only on what is going on between us.  I am not thinking about something we said last week.  I am not thinking of what's coming up this Friday. I am not thinking about doing another Koppel show, or about what medications I'm taking.  I am talking to you.  I am thinking about you."

This is talking about where you have a partner and you have to fall backwards and trust that your partner will catch you.  This shows you're willingness to trust someone, to trust yourself.  To just close your eyes and take that leap of faith. 
"You see, he says to the girl, you closed your eyes.  That was the difference.  Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel.  And if you are ever going to have other people trust you, you must feel that you can trust them, too-even when you're in the dark.  Even when you're falling."


"Life is a series of pulls back and forth.  You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do something else.  Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't.  You take certain things for granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.  A tension of opposites, like a pull on a rubber band.  And most of us live somewhere in the middle."  "Which side wins? Love wins.  Love always wins."

Simple. Clear. Powerful. True.