Tuesdays with Morrie part 2. Culture & Dying

We put our values in the wrong things. It’s all part of the same problem. And it leads to very disillusioned lives. We’ve got a form of brainwashing going on. They repeat something over and over again. Owning things is good. More money is good. More property is good. More commercialism is good. More is good. More is good. We repeat it – and have it repeated to us – over and over until nobody bothers to even think otherwise. The average person is so fogged up by all this, he has no perspective on what’s really important anymore. Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. When you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you’re looking for, no matter how much of them you have. There’s a big confusion over what we want versus what we need. You need food, you want a chocolate sundae. You have to be honest with yourself. You don’t need the new sports car, you don’t need the biggest house. The truth is, you don’t get satisfaction from those things. You know what really gives you satisfaction?  

Offering others what you have to give. I mean your time. your concern. Your storytelling.

So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re 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 your community around you, and devote yourself to certain something that gives you purpose and meaning.

 People are only mean when they are threatened and that’s what our culture does. This is what our economy does. Even people who have jobs are threatened, because they worry about losing them. And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself. You start making money a god. It’s all part of this culture. I don’t mean you disregard every rule of your community. The little things I can obey. But the thing is – how we think, what we value – those you must choose yourself. You can’t let anyone – or any society – determine those for you. The way to do it isn’t running away, every society has it’s own problems. No matter where you live the biggest defect we have is our shortsightedness. We don’t see what we could be. We should be looking at our potential, stretching ourselves into everything we can become. 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. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own. 

We all have the same beginning and the same end. How different can we be? In the beginning of life, we need others to survive, right? And in the end of life, you need others to survive, right? In between we need others as well. 

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, meeting 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 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.

Everyone knows they’re going to die but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently. 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 life while you’re living. 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. Why is it so hard to think about dying? Because most of us all walk around as if we’re sleepwalking. We really don’t experience the world fully, because we’re half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do. When you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently, you strip away all that stuff and you focus on the essentials. We are too involved in materialistic things, and they don’t satisfy us. The loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted.

 

Dying is only one thing to be sad over, living unhappily is something else. So many people are unhappy. Why? Well for one thing the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We’re teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it. Create your own. Most people can’t do it.

It’s natural to die. The fact that we make such a big hullabaloo over it is because we don’t see ourselves as part of nature. We think because we’re human we’re something above nature. We’re not. Everything that gets born, dies. As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without rally going away. All the love you created is still here. All the memories are still here. You live on – in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here. 

Death ends a life, not a relationship. 

Tuesdays with Morrie part 1. Life & Love

The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love and to let it come in. Let it come in. We think we don’t deserve love, we think if we let it in we’ll become too soft. But a wise man named Levine said it right. Love is the only rational act.

Love is how you stay alive, even after you’re gone. Being fully present means you should be with the person you’re with. 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 show, I am not thinking about what medications I’m taking. I am talking to you. I am thinking about you. Part of the problem is that 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 empty too and they keep running. Once you start running, it's hard to slow yourself down. It is so important to find loving relationship with someone because so much of the culture does not give you that. 

There is no formula to relationships. They have to negotiated in loving ways, with room for both parties, what they want and what they need, what they can do and what their life is like. In business people negotiate to win. They negotiate to get what they want. 

Love is different. Love is when you are concerned about someone elses’s situation as you are about your own.

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. 

 

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.

 

Learn to detach. 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, 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, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. 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. 

Forgive yourself before you die. Then forgive others. You can’t get stuck on the regrets of what should’ve happened.