today in class we watched the show 'tuesdays with morrie'.
some of u may have already read the book.
at the end, there wasn't a dry eye in the whole class. well, for all the girls anyway.
anyway, the show has really inspired me. ok this is gonna sound really cliche, but it seemed to be 'speaking' to me.
notice my previous entry? yup.. i wanted to delete it, but then i wouldnt be really able to make my point.
tuesdays with morrie thought me that its ok to feel self pity. but don't mull over it. give yourself some time to feel pitiful, but then move on. because imagine what you could have done with all the time spent feeling sorry for yourself. that time could be better spent actually doing something for yourself.
here are some particularly inspiring quotations adapted from the book itself. the first one touched a sore spot. see how it relates to the previous blog entry. gosh...
"Take any emotion - love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a 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 attached, 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, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, 'All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognise that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment."
"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 have 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."
"The truth is, when our mothers held us, rocked us, stroked our heads, none of us ever got enough of that. We all yearn in some way to return to those days when we were completely taken care of - unconditional love, unconditional attention. Most of us didn't get enough."
"Wherever I went in my life, I met people wanting to gobble up something new. Gobble up a new car. Gobble up a new piece of property. Gobble up the latest toy. And then they wanted to tell you about it.
Guess what I got? Guess what I got?
You know how I always interpreted that? These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting sort of a hug back. But it never works. You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship.
Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I'm sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feelings you are looking for, no matter how much of them you have."
Labels: tuesdays with morrie