Tuesdays with Morrie

"Tuesdays With Morrie" by Mitch Albom was an amazing book that touched me on a very personal level. My grandfather also suffered through the hard times from serious diseases. Throughout the story, I felt a connection with Morrie. Mitch and Morrie's Tuesday discussions were always filled with things to learn. Each discussion allowed me to see how Morrie was living with this disease and teach me very important lessons. The novel taught me to view things in life in a very different way.

"Tuesdays With Morrie. An old man, a young man, and life's greatest lessons" The title of the book says exactly what you learn and experience while reading this book. You learn about an old man who has seen it all. As I believe, the older you get the wiser you get. Living in this world and experiencing what the world gives you and what it throws at you at tough times makes you learn from every lesson and become wiser and wiser. Morrie talks about six steps people go through, some may pass in all of them some in a couple, and how to deal with these steps.

"Talk about it, don't hide it." Talking about your issues makes things much lighter and easier on you, not only with disease, and death, but your daily life problems. I learned this through past experiences. Whenever I have a problem or an issue which I think a lot about it always makes it easier to talk to a friend or a family member, let your feelings out. The response they give you makes it easier for you to carry or even sometimes they provide you with a solution.

"Accept it." Accept that you are sick, accept that you are dying. Denial just makes things harder to deal with. Once you accept your problems you can move on. You move on to ways to deal with it or solve it. Accept the things in life that you do not believe are happening to you. For example if you lose all your money, do not just sit there and deny that this has happened. Things like this made lots of people go crazy. Accept your problems and learn from your mistakes and move on. Try to fix it or if that's not possible try to learn to live with it.

"Keep an open heart." Always treat people the way you want to be treated. Keep your heart open to the people around you so that they do the same to you. Love is one of the most important things in life. In order to be happy, for many people, you need the love and the support of the people around you. How would you live without your family and friends?

"Be alert and awake to your interest." Be alert and awake to your surroundings. Use the time you have to enjoy the things you like. Enjoy your hobbies, things that make you happier. Learn about the things you leave. Teach the people of what you know, help others like you want them to help you. In order to be happy, you have to do the things you love, and sit with the people you love. Morrie teaches us how to enjoy these hard times by doing what you love.

"Be compassionate." Love like you want to be loved. Be kind to others to be treated with kindness, like Morrie said "keep an open heart". "A study from UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco found that women who demonstrated high levels of compassion toward others not only had lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, but were also more receptive to social support. This allowed them to more easily handle stress, and to better maintain overall well-being. So in fact, looking outside of one's self actually benefits the self and fostering an attitude of compassion toward others may be a way to improve one's own sensitivity to stress." (http://www.goodtherapy.org)

"Treat yourself gently." Do not punish yourself for the problems you have. It is not your fault that you are sick and you are going to die. Being tough and angry on yourself never helps. Treat yourself gently and enjoy what you have left in life. Morrie shows us to see the bottle half full not half empty. Even though you are dying you have had the pleasure to live in this world, enjoy the time left, and make this a memorable time to you and to those around you.

Morrie and Mitch teach us important lessons of life, and how to react to certain actions in life. I'm going to show some of the problems they faced and how they dealt with them, teaching us how to deal with our problems in many ways. The newspaper is Mitch's way of living he feels that his job is like a "lifeline...when I saw my stories in print each morning, I knew that, in at least one way, I was alive." His way of solving