Realm, let death also be full of charm. Death returns life to purity.
Woke up earlier this morning than usual. I looked at my phone and it was 4:58. There is still 2 minutes and 5 o'clock, get up.
I went to the kitchen to cook the porridge so that my daughter could wake up and drink the hot porridge. When I was looking for rice, I heard the sound of playing the piano, as if someone was practicing, and I heard the sound of someone singing. I cooked the porridge, washed it simply, sat down at the desk, and looked out the window, which was slightly bright, and the wind was blowing, slightly cool. There was already a sparse voice outside. Maybe every day someone gets up early, but I just don't get up early.
Just when I opened the window in the morning, I suddenly thought of death, and if it was the last day of my life, would I get up as early as today, do what I thought was important, and then feel calm, and feel that the day has not been in vain.
The reason why I feel this way is because I have been reading a book for the past two days, "Meet Tuesday". This is a documentary novel that tells a story like this:
Morrie, a professor of social psychology in his seventies, suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1994 and died a year later. As a proud protégé in his early years, Mickey visited the old professor every Tuesday during his fourteen weeks of illness, listening to his final teachings, and after his death, he chained the teacher's awakening proverb into a chain and titled "Meet Tuesday".
The book caused a sensation throughout the United States as soon as it was published, and it was on the American book bestseller list for forty-four consecutive weeks. For author Mitch Alboum, the experience of "Meeting Tuesday" with his mentor was an opportunity to re-examine himself and re-read the required lessons of life.
In these fourteen life lessons, they talked about the world, self-pity, regret, death, family, feelings, aging, money, love, marriage, culture, forgiveness, a perfect day, and the last verse was the funeral. In all these topics they talked about, every aspect shook my heart and made me rethink life and think about everything at this stage. Here are five aspects that touched me the most.
Morrie suffers from amyotrophic (spinal cord) lateral sclerosis, or als, a sinister, relentless neurological disorder that ends up dying of asphyxia in the lungs due to lack of oxygen. The brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking also had the same disease, with a hole in his throat, speaking with the help of a computer synthesizer, and a sensor to make a judgment based on the changes in his blinking eyes.
Hawking is admirable, but that's not how Morrie chose to live. For him, to be alive means to be able to communicate with others, and when this ability disappears, he should also disappear.
The author, Mickey, is heartbroken by his teacher's illness, but Morrie is much more optimistic, telling Mickey that he is lucky because not everyone has the opportunity to say goodbye to the world, and he is ready to say goodbye at any time.
He told the student Mitch: "Realize that you will die, and always be prepared, you will cherish life more when you are alive." "But everyone knows he's going to die, but no one wants to believe it, including before he fell ill." This is because most people live in dreams and don't really experience the world, and we are in a state of confusion, doing what we think we should do.
Only by brushing away the dust of appearance can we see the true meaning of life. When you realize that you are dying, you don't see the problem differently. At that point, work will not be as important, and perhaps more time and energy will be given to meeting mental needs.
"Learn to die, you learn to live" This is Morrie's reflection on life and death after his illness, and he worries that Mickey does not understand, continuing to explain: "We pursue material needs too much, but they do not satisfy us. We ignore the loving relationships between people, we ignore the world around us. ”
Morrie said these words to Mickey and to all the young people. Everyone knows about death, but never really treats life. Only by facing death squarely can we find the mission of life and do more meaningful things.
Morrie had a modest childhood, living in the poorest streets, his father a low-class worker, and his mother dying when he was eight years old, leaving him and his young brother to live with his father. Fortunately, his stepmother was very kind to them, and although life was still difficult, his optimism and enterprising spirit always inspired him. This led to Morrie, a professor of social psychology who later lived.
But all this has passed, and now Morrie has a virtuous wife and two excellent sons. Since his illness, he has a special experience with his family, which can be summed up in two points:
(1) The family is the foundation of a person. If you don't get the support, care, care, and care from your family, you have very little.
(2) The family makes a person psychologically safe. Morrie said that if he lived alone, the current illness would make him unbearable, although there will be colleagues and friends to visit, but this is not the same thing as having a person who always cares about you and is inseparable from you. Only your family can give you psychological security, money, fame, and work can't do it.
Mickey told Morrie about the psychological contradictions of our generation in having children, and we saw children as stumbling blocks in our careers, feeling that they were forcing us to do the "parent" work that we did not want to do. Also, will they be around when we really need them?
In this regard, Morrie said that there is no experience in having children, and there is nothing to replace it. If you want to experience how to take responsibility for a person and how to love with all your heart, then you should have children.
Regarding companionship, as long as Morrie needs it, his two sons will put down their jobs and accompany their father every second. But Morrie was reluctant to do so, and he told them, "Don't stop your lives, or it won't be me, but three, who will be destroyed by the disease." ”
I have also struggled with family and children' things, but now it is not, the family is a place worthy of our whole heart to love, and whether the child wants or not has nothing to do with the child, only about their own heart.
Morrie's body was getting weaker and weaker, and even a private thing like wiping his ass needed to be done by someone else. But rather not embarrassed, Morrie is optimistic, saying it makes him feel the joy of relying on others, as if he's back in infancy.
Morrie takes a more unique view of age, saying that aging is not decay, it is maturity. The reason why people want to become younger is precisely to reflect the dissatisfaction, incompleteness and meaninglessness of their own lives. Because once you find the meaning of life, you don't want to go back to the past, you want to go forward, you want to see more, do more. You want to experience that experience at the age of 65.
Morrie said that all young people should understand this philosophy: if you have not been willing to get old, then you will never be happy, because you are going to get old after all.
The best thing to do is to accept the status quo and enjoy yourself. When you are a child, you are happy to be a child; when you are a wise old man, you are willing to be a wise old man; you are willing to accept all the rights that nature gives. Understand that we belong to any age, until now we are.
Only in this way can we not envy other people's life stages, because we have also lived through this life stage.
On the tenth Tuesday, Mitch took his wife Jenning to visit Morrie. Jenning is a professional singer, but she usually never easily agrees to a friend's request to "come to a song", mostly out of shyness, and she is a perfectist who is very considerate of the occasion.
However, when Morrie said that he wanted to listen to the song, Jenning readily agreed and sang softly. This made Mickey marvel at the ability of the teacher, who is so good at opening the emotional floodgates in people's hearts.
Mickey deliberately talks about marriage with his teacher, because almost everyone is confused about the issue of marriage, including Mickey himself, and when he thinks of proposing marriage to Jenning for seven years, he is full of doubts, is his generation more cautious than his predecessors, or more selfish?
Morrie says many of the problems in marriage are rooted in people not knowing what to get from their partners. But it is no wonder that they can't even recognize themselves, so how can they know the person they want to marry?
Morrie had been married to his wife Charlotte for forty-four years, and now that Morrie was ill, Charlotte would remind him to take his medicine, come in and massage his neck, or talk to him about their son. They are like players on a team, and they only need one look to understand each other. As for topics that Charlotte didn't like, Morrie would respect her very much and never talk about them.
Morrie said that you can get tested through marriage, you know yourself, you know each other, you know whether you are compatible with each other.
Mitch asked him if there was a standard by which to measure the success of a marriage.
Morrie smiled and said, things are not that simple, but there are rules for love and marriage:
If you don't respect each other, your relationship will be in trouble; If you don't know how to compromise, your relationship will be in trouble; If you can't communicate openly and honestly with each other, your relationship will be in trouble; If you don't have common values, you will also have trouble, you must have the same values, And the most important thing in the values is your belief in the importance of marriage.
In just one paragraph, it speaks to the commonality of good marriages: respect, appropriate compromise, open and honest communication, and the same values.
Mickey asked the teacher, what would you do if you had a perfectly healthy day?
Morrie thought for a moment and said, "Get up in the morning for morning workout and have a delicious breakfast with sweet rolls and tea." Then we went for a swim and invited our friends to lunch, and I only invited one or two at a time, so we could talk about their families, about their problems, about their friendships.
Then I would go for a walk in the park and see the natural colors. See the beautiful birds and enjoy the long-lost nature.
In the evening, we go to a restaurant together to enjoy the best pasta, or maybe ducks – I like to eat ducks – and spend the rest of the day dancing. I would jump with everyone until I was exhausted. Then go home and get a good night's sleep. ”
Too ordinary, no extravagance, and Mitch was a little disappointed to hear it. He suspected that Morrie would fly to Italy for lunch with the president, or to the beach, or to find ways to enjoy a strange, extravagant life. After months of lying down, unable to move his feet—he had found that perfection on a very ordinary day.
But then Mitch realized that this was the answer to all the questions. I think I'm aware of this answer, too. When we learn to make peace with life, we will find that the perfection of the mind and the mind is nothing more than a very ordinary daily life in the end.
At the last moment of his life, Morrie gave fourteen lessons to his student Mickey, each of which is worth recalling and thinking about. There is the most important verse he did not say, but he did it, which is: there is no word "too late" in life, until the day he says goodbye he is still changing himself.
None of us can erase the traces of our lives, and we can't live again, but we can try to change ourselves from now on.