Introduction
The need for guidance in life is something that people rarely admit, especially when they reach a mature age. The loss of such guidance could explain the fact that people do not appreciate the little things in life that they used to enjoy before facing real-life obstacles. “Tuesdays with Morrie”- a nonfiction book by Mitch Albom, addresses the lessons of life that the author learned from meeting his college professor after sixteen years since attending his class. The main idea of these simple lessons that Albom learned through visiting his professor- Morrie Schwartz, is that it is never too late to rethink your life. This essay explores three values-lessons that changed Mitch over the pace of the book, along with providing personal opinions on values from the book that could possibly change my life.
Mitch’s Tuesdays
The first value that evidently changed Mitch is to never fear giving or accepting love as “Love is the only rational act”. Through the book it could be seen that Mitch never showed his emotions, “Morrie. He had wanted to make me cry since I was a freshman“. However at the end of the book Mitch no more feared nor was he ashamed of expressing his emotions when he admitted that “he had finally made me cry”.
The second value that affected Mitch is the importance of family. Although it cannot be said that Mitch did not acknowledge this importance, rather than that he actually stopped trying, and in the case of his brother Peter, he no longer has what he had with him. It could be seen that Mitch acknowledged at the end that he might not have the same with his brother, but it is not a reason to stop communicating. After that Peter reached his brother saying that he “respected his distance and that all I wanted was to be in touch—in the present, not just the past—to hold him in my life as much as he could let me.” As Mitch admitted, he “never said such a thing to him before.“ This change in Mitch’s behavior could also be devoted to the value of “Offering others what you have to give”, where Mitch was expecting Peter to contact rather than making the first step.
The third lesson is the small pleasures of the perfect day when Peter was disappointed by the way Morrie found perfection in such average details. Peter himself acknowledged missing these details saying “I buried myself in accomplishments because with accomplishments, I believed I could control things”. However after Morrie’s death he found the time and the pleasure in going back through his old boxes and discovering the “comments scribbled to Morrie, and beneath them were his comments scribbled back.” Such small details could have made his day a perfect one.
Personal Tuesdays
It is hard to choose specific values that could possibly shape my life as most of the lessons taught to Mitch are in some way missed in mine. I would preferably go with “fear of aging”, “love goes on” and “talk about money”. In a perfect scenario, I would like to maintain the acknowledgment while being young that happiness is not in money but in devoting myself to others. In a perfect scenario, I hope that giving my life a satisfying meaning will prevent me from thinking of turning back the time when I get old, and I hope that in this scenario I will find the beauty of life at every age I experience. Finally, in this perfect scenario, I hope by incorporating these values I will live a life that will touch many people so that when my time will come I will not be afraid of being forgotten, as I hope to keep a good memory in every person that was close to me.
Works Cited
Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays with Morrie: An Old Man, a Young Man, and Life’s Greatest Lesson. Doubleday, 1997.