Tuesdays with Morrie...

I had heard about the book 'Tuesdays with Morrie' and had heard about 'Mitch Albom'. I had wanted to read 'The five people you meet in heaven' and 'Tuesdays with Morrie', but somehow I had never got the time nor felt the urgency to read it.

A few days ago, I saw the book on Pradeep's table and picked it up. It was finally time for me to read 'Tuesday's with Morrie'... I enjoyed the book and wanted to put down a few excerpts that I found wonderful and did not want to lose from the  book.

So here goes...

"Accept what you are able to do and what you are not able to do...Accept the past as past, without denying it or discarding it"

"There are some morning when I cry and cry and mourn for myself. Some mornings, I'm so angry and bitter. But it doesn't last too long. Then I get up and day, 'I want to live...'

"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"

"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...Love is the only rational act"

"Sometimes you cannot believe what you see, you have to believe what you feel. And if you are ever gong 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..."

It is important "to 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....If you hold back on 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..."

"Do the kinds of things that come from the heart. When you do, you won't be dissatisfied you won't be envious, you won't be longing for somebody else's things. On the contrary, you'll be overwhelmed with what comes back..."

"He looked you straight in the eye, and he listened as if you were the only person in the world. How much better would people get along if their first encounter each day were like this...believe in being fully present..."

"...There are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don't respect the other person you're gonna have a lot of trouble If you don't know how to compromise you're gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can't talk openly about what goes on between you you're gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don't have a common set of values n life, you're gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike..."

"As long as we can love each other and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on - in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here...Death ends a life, not a relationship..."

And so here I stop...with a few excerpts put down, a few thoughts to think about and a resolve to atleast make an attempt to imbibe a few of them...