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.