Tuesdays With Morrie by Mitch Albom, a memoir about a series of visits with Morrie (the authors former professor) dying from progressing ALS. As the book progresses, so does the disease, paralyzing Morrie gradually from his legs to his lungs. Morrie shares life lessons and teaches that while we cannot control what happens to us, we can choose how we understand and respond to it.
“Have I told you about the tension of opposites?” he says. The tension of opposites? “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.” Sounds like a wrestling match, I say. “A wrestling match.” He laughs. “Yes, you could describe life that way.”So which side wins, I ask? “Which side wins?” He smiles at me, the crinkled eyes, the crooked teeth. “Love wins. Love always wins.”
“I heard a nice little story the other day,” Morrie says. He closes his eyes for a moment and I wait. “Okay. The story is about a little wave, bobbing along in the ocean, having a grand old time. He’s enjoying the wind and the fresh air—until he notices the other waves in front of him, crashing against the shore. “ ‘My God, this is terrible,’ the wave says. ‘Look what’s going to happen to me!’ “Then along comes another wave. It sees the first wave, looking grim, and it says to him, ‘Why do you look so sad?’ “The first wave says, ‘You don’t understand! We’re all going to crash! All of us waves are going to be nothing! Isn’t it terrible?’ “The second wave says, ‘No, you don’t understand. You’re not a wave, you’re part of the ocean.’ ” I smile. Morrie closes his eyes again. “Part of the ocean,” he says, “part of the ocean.” I watch him breathe, in and out, in and out.”
“I remembered what Morrie said during our visit: “The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it.”
“People are only mean when they’re threatened,” he said later that day, “and that’s what our culture does. That’s what our economy does. Even people who have jobs in our economy are threatened, because they worry about losing them. And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself. You start making money a god. It is all part of this culture.”
“Here’s what I mean by building your own little subculture,” Morrie said. “I don’t mean you disregard every rule of your community. I don’t go around naked, for example. I don’t run through red lights. The little things, I can obey. But the big things—how we think, what we value—those you must choose yourself. You can’t let anyone—or any society—determine those for you.” “Invest in the human family. Invest in people. Build a little community of those you love and who love you.”
“He took a breath, then added his mantra: “Love each other or die.”
“Remember what I said about finding a meaningful life? I wrote it down, but now I can recite it: Devote yourself to loving others,” devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.”
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion, a memoir I started reading after seeing this quote, “Life changes in an instant. The ordinary instant.” She writes about the journey through grief following the sudden death of her husband and her daughters illness. Reminds me that our lives are full of small acts of courage and we are all just trying to make sense of the world in the ways we can.
“This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months the cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythm of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. … This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. It is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.”
“I need in the dream to discuss this with John.
Or was it even a dream?
Who is the director of dreams, would he care?
Was it only by dreaming or writing that I could find out what I thought?”
Greenlights by Matthew Mcconaughey. I only knew of Matthew Mcconaughey from Interstellar. I was surprised by the depth of his writing. He is a phenomenal storyteller, and this book a memoir of journals, philosophies, diaries, life experiences from the past 35 years. Lessons to learn are to be more involved, less impressed, and engage with your life as much as possible. (click arrow for quotes)
“i believe everything we do in life is part of a plan. sometimes the plan goes as intended, and sometimes it doesnt. thats part of the plan. realizing this is a greenlight in itself.
the problems we face today eventually turn into blessing in the rearview mirror of life. in time, yesterdays red light leads us to a greenlight. all destruction eventually leads to construction, all death eventually leads to birth, all pain eventually leads to pleasure. in this life or the next, what goes down will come up.
its a matter of how we see the challenge in front of us and how we engage with it.
persist, pivot, or concede. its up to us, our choice every time.
this is a book about how to catch more yeses in a world of nos and how to recognize when a no might actually be a yes.
this is a book about catching greenlights and realizing that the yellows and reds eventually turn green.”
“The inevitability of a situation is not relative; when we accept the outcome of a given situation as inevitable, then how we choose to deal with it is relative.
We either persist and continue in our present pursuit of a desired result, pivot and take a new tack to get it, or concede altogether and tally one up for fate. We push on, call an audible, or wave the white flag and live to fight another day.
The secret to our satisfaction lies in which one of these we choose to do when.
This is the art of livin.”
“Less impressed, more involved. The sooner we become less impressed with our life, our accomplishments, our career, our relationships, the prospects in front of us. The sooner we become less impressed and more involved with these things. The sooner we get better at them, we must be more than happy to just be here.”
“we must learn the consequence of negligence—its not just what we do, its what we dont do thats important as well. we are guilty by omission.”
“Boundaries to freedom. We need finites, borders, gravity, demarcations, shape, and resistance to have order. This order, creates responsibility, the responsibility creates judgement (& consequence), the judgement creates choice. In the choice lies the freedom. To create the weather that gives us the most favorable wind, we must first remove that which causes the most friction to our core being. This process of elimination creates order by default therefore rendering more to go toward, for instance, and less to back away from. We then embrace these affirmations because doing so brings us pleasure and less pain. So we cultivate them until they become habit and form our constitution, then they proliferate and become emanations of are essence. This is where true identity is born.”
“Conservative early, liberal late. Create structure, so you can have freedom. Create your weather so you can blow in the wind. Map your direction so you can swerve in the lanes. Clean up so you can get dirty. Choreograph, then dance. Learn to read and write before you start making up words. Check if the pool has water in it before you dive in. Learn to sail before you fly. Initiations before inaugurations. Earn your Saturdays. We need discipline, guidelines, context and responsibility early in any new endeavor. Its the time to sacrifice. To learn, to observe, to take heed. If and when we get knowledge of the space, the craft, the people and the plan. Then we can let our freak flag fly and create. Creativity needs borders. Individuality needs resistance. The earth needs gravity. Without them there is no form. No art. Only Chaos.”
“if only
means you wanted something but did not get it.
for some reason, either by your own incompetence or the worlds intervention, it did not happen.
sometimes this is just the breaks and we need to bow out gracefully.
but more often than we care to admit, we dont get what we want
because we quit early or we didnt take the necessary risk to get it.
the more boots we put in the back side of our if onlys, the more we will get what we want.
dont walk the its too late its too soon
tightrope until you die.”
“We are not here to tolerate are differences, we are here to accept them. We are not here to celebrate our sameness, we are here to salute are distinctions. We are not born into equal circumstances or with equal abilities but we should have equal opportunities. As individuals, we unite in our values. celebrate that.”
“Made for the moment. We are all made for every moment we encounter. Whether the moment makes us or we make the moment. Whether we were helped less in it or on top of it. The predator or the prey. We are made for that moment.”
“to agnostics:
just because it says anonymous
doesnt mean it has no author.”
“Prayer — God when I cross the truth, give me the awareness to receive it, the consciousness to recognize it, the presence to personalize it, the patience to preserve it and the courage to live it. First we have to put ourselves in the place to receive the truth. This noisy world we live in with it’s commitments, deadlines, fix this’s, do that’s, and expectations make it hard to get clarity and peace of mind. Famous or not. So we have to consciously put ourselves in a place to receive that clarity. Whether that’s prayer, meditation, a walk-a-bout, being in the right company, a road trip, whatever it is for each of us. Then after we’ve put ourselves in this place to listen to the gospel and hear their music. We then have to be aware enough to receive it and conscious enough to recognize it. It will arrive nameless because it is clear, omnipresent, unanimous, and infinite. It usually lands like a butterfly, quick and quiet. When we let it in, it needs no introduction. Then the relationship can begin and we need the presence to personalize it. This is where the anonymous truth gets intimate and autonomous. We ask ourselves what it means, how it’s unique to us and why it’s hear now? Then comes the harder part, having the patience to preserve it. Getting it from our intellect to our bones, soul, and instinct. We must pay attention to it, concentrate on it, keep it lit and not let it flutter away. This takes time, commitment and tendence. If we make it this far, after we put ourselves in the right place to receive the truth, recognize it as such, made it our own and preserved it. Then comes the cutagra. Having the courage to live it. To actually walk away from that place where it found us, take that truth with us into the screaming arena of our daily lives, practice it and make it an active part of who we are. If we can do that, then we are on our way to Heaven on Earth where what we want is what we need, where what we need is what we want.”
“time and truth.
two constants you can rely on.
one shows up for the first time every time while the other never leaves.”
“i believe the truth is only offensive when we’re lying”
“the INTELLECT
is not meant to surpass the apparent so far as to conceal it or make it more confusing.
it is meant to expose the truth more clearly and reveal more of the obvious
from more lines of sight.
it should simplify things, not make then more cerebral. “
A roof is a man made thing. You ever choked? You know what I mean, fumbled at the goal line, stuck your foot in your mouth when you were trying to ask that girl out on a date, had a brain freeze on the final exam you were totally prepared for, lipped out of 3 foot putt to win the golf tournament, or been paralyzed by the feeling of “Oh my god, life can’t get any better do I really deserve this?!” I have. What happens when we get that feeling? We clinch up, get short of breath, self conscious. We have an out of body experience where we observe ourselves in the 3rd person. No longer present. Now not doing well what we are there to do.
We become voyeurs of our moment because we let it become bigger than us and in doing so we just became less involved in it and more impressed with it. Why does this happen? It happens because when we mentally give a person, place, or point in time more credit than ourselves. We then create a fictitious ceiling. A restriction over the expectations we have of our performance in that moment. We get tense. We focus on the outcome instead of the activity and we miss the doing of the deed. We either think the world depends on the result or it’s to good to be true but it doesn’t and it isn’t and it’s not our right to think it does or is! Don’t create imaginary constraints. A leading role, a blue ribbon, a winning score, a great idea, the love of our life, euphoric bliss. Who are we to think we don’t deserve these fortunes when they are in our grasp? Who are we to think we haven’t earned them? If we stay in process within ourselves. In the joy of the doing. We will never choke at the finish line. Why? Because we’re not thinking of the finish line, we’re not looking at the clock, we’re not watching ourselves from the jumbotron performing. We are performing in real time, where the approach is the destination and there is no goal line because we are never finished…reach beyond your grasp, have immortal finish lines, and turn your red light green because a roof is a man made thing. “
“ive never felt like a victim. i have a lot of proof that the world is conspiring to make me happy. ive gotten away with more in life than in my dreams.”
“the best way to teach is the way that is most understood. “
Why we all need a walkabout.
Noise-to-signal ratio.
We are more bombarded by unnatural stimuli than ever before.
We need to put ourselves in places of decreased sensory input so we can hear the background signals of our psychological processes.
As the noise decreases, the signals become clearer,
we can hear ourselves again, and we reunite.
Time alone simplifies the heart.
Memory catches up, opinions form.
We meet truth again, and it teaches us, landing on stable feet between our reaching out and retreat, letting us know we are not lonely in our state, just alone.
Because our unconscious mind now has room to reveal itself, we see it again.
It dreams, perceives, and thinks in pictures, which we now can observe.
In this solitude, we then begin to think in pictures, and actualize what we see.
Our souls become anonymous again, and we realize we are stuck with the one person we can never be rid of: ourselves.
The Socratic dialogue can be ugly, painful, lonesome, hard, guilt-ridden, and a nightmare vicious enough to need a mouth guard not to gnaw our fangs into nubs while we sweat cold in feverish panic.
We are forced to confront ourselves.
And this is good.
We more than deserve this suffrage, we’ve earned it.
An honest man’s pillow is his peace of mind,
and no matter who’s in our bed each night, we sleep with ourselves.
We either forgive or get sick and tired of it.
Herein lies the evolution.
With nowhere to run, and forced to deal with ourselves, our ugly everyday suppressions break out of the zoo and monkey around,
where we find our self in the ring with them, deciding, no more, or let it slide.
Whatever the verdict, we grow.
It’s us and us, our always and only company.
We tend to ourselves, and get in good graces once again.
Then we return to civilization, able to better tend to our tendencies.
Why? Because we took a walkabout”
Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer. Krakauer was originally sent to cover Everest expiditions as a journalist for Outside magazine. This book is about the authors personal experience surviving the 1996 Mount Everest disaster where eight other climbers had died after a heavy storm. He accounts the series of events that day, poor decision-making, remaining survivors guilt, the commercialization of Everest, fragility of life.
“There were many, many fine reasons not to go, but attempting to climb Everest is an intrinsically irrational act—a triumph of desire over sensibility. Any person who would seriously consider it is almost by definition beyond the sway of reasoned argument.”
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. Stevenson speaks on his experience working as a lawyer fighting for those that were wrongly convicted. He focuses on the story of Walter McMillian who was a Black man given a death sentence for a murder he didn’t commit. (click arrow for quote)
“Yet we were comfortable killing people who kill, in part because we think we can do it in a manner that doesn’t implicate our own humanity… I couldn’t stop thinking that we don’t spend much time contemplating the details of what killing someone actually involves.”
Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis by Dr. Lisa Sanders, a Yale School of Medicine physician, author of the monthly New York Times Magazine column “Diagnosis,” the inspiration for the hit Fox TV series House, M.D. She dives the thought process behind solving difficult medical mysteries, super interesting cases.
That Good Night by Sunita Puri, a palliative care physician and assistant professor of clinical medicine at USC who writes about her experiences with helping terminally-ill patients and their family members make end of life decisions. a perspective you dont really hear about and difficult conversations (click for quotes)
“Joan Didion’s words: ‘Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.’”
“they have made sense of loss earlier in their lives, and how they are making sense of loss now, in the days or weeks or months they may have left to live. You must act as if it is normal for a doctor to ask these probing questions during the first or second meeting with them. Because if you act awkward, they will wonder why you are here, why you are asking about their pain and nausea and shortness of breath, about who makes their medical decisions if they no longer can, about what they hope for, and whether those hopes are realistic. You remind yourself to listen to them carefully, to choose your words carefully, because one day you will be on the other side of this conversation, and you will long for someone to listen to you and choose their words carefully.
You will tell them how sorry you are that they are sick, that they have been in such distress, that they have to have a difficult conversation with you. You wonder if being a stranger actually helps you to say what the doctors they have known for a longer time cannot say.”
“I realized that life was simultaneously so vast and so small. It was daybreak after a good sleep and exhaustion as the stars emerged. It was the first crisp bite of an apple, the taste of butter on toast. It was the way a tree’s shadow moved along the wall of a room as the afternoon passed. It was the smell of a baby’s skin, the feeling of a heart fluttering with anticipation or nerves. It was the steady rhythm of a lover’s breathing during sleep. It was both solitude in a wide green field and the crowding together of bodies in a church. It was equally common and singular, a shared tumult and a shared peace. It was the many things I’d ignored or half appreciated as I chased the bigger things. It was infinity in a seashell.”
Upstream by Mary Oliver, a collection of personal essays that reflect on nature and where she finds creativity in solitude. She touches on some parts of childhood, the role that Whitman and Emerson’s writings and poems played in her life. Mary Oliver is one of my favorite poets because she finds inspiration for most of her poems in nature. (click for quotes)
“I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.”
“In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.”
“But first and foremost, I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing—an artifact, a moment of seemly and robust wordiness—wonderful as that part of it is. I learned that the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company. It was everything that was needed, when everything was needed. I remember the delicate, rumpled way into the woods, and the weight of the books in my pack. I remember the rambling, and the loafing–the wonderful days when, with Whitman, I tucked my trouser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time.”
“I am, myself, three selves at least. To begin with, there is the child I was. Certainly I am not that child anymore. yet, distantly, or sometimes not so distantly, I can hear that child’s voice – I can feel its hope, or its distress. It has not vanished. Powerful, egotistical, insinuating – its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams. It is not gone, not by a long shot. It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.
And there is the attentive, social self. This is the smile and the doorkeeper. This is the portion that winds the clock, that steers through the dailiness of life, that keeps in mind appointments that must be made, and then met. It is fettered to a thousand notions of obligation. It moves across the hours of the day as though the movement itself were the whole task. Whether it gathers as it goes some branch of wisdom or delight, or nothing at all, is a matter with which it is hardly concerned. What this self hears night and day, what it loves beyond all other songs, is the endless springing forward of the clock, those measures strict and vivacious, and full of certainty.
…Every day, twelve little bins in which to order disorderly life, and even more disorderly thought. The town’s clock cries out, and the face on every wrist hums or shines; the world keeps pace with itself. Another day is passing, a regular and ordinary day. (Notice that world also.)
…
And this is also true. In creative work – creative work of all kinds – those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward. Which is something altogether different from the ordinary. Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else. Its labor requires a different outlook – a different set of priorities. Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.”
“Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion.”
“How to tell a story” the essential guide to memorable storytelling. (Not a memoir but a teaching guide book) I learned that stories dont have to be interesting if you can tell stories in an interesting way, which is something you have to practice. “Stories explain your heart, decode your history, decipher who you are, and translate it all to whoever takes the time to listen carefully. They’re what make families, friendship, and love possible. They’re both ordinary and exquisite. Stories are the currency of community.” (click for quotes)
“ANECDOTE VS. STORY
People tend to use the words anecdote and story interchangeably, but actually they are quite different. An anecdote is a short, amusing account of a real incident or person. A story is beyond a string of occurrences; it deals with evolution. If you don’t want or need anything, it’s not a story. A good story builds. By the end, things have intrinsically changed. Something about it has a lasting effect. You can’t go back. You can’t unsee it. You can’t un-be it. You are a different person because of the events that unfolded.”
“Mining for Memories (Ch. 3)
Finding your story requires the hard work of sifting through all your life experiences, all the phone calls, alarm clocks, and deadlines; the sunsets and taxes; the breakups and stumbles and epic fails; the home runs and stupid luck. You look through all that and try to identify the significant moments when you felt most like yourself, or the self you could finally see you wanted to become.Think about sitting down with an old photo album or scrapbook. (If you don’t have one, you can create one in your mind. What pictures do you dearly wish you had?) The photos and artifacts in your album, real or imagined, will conjure memories of people and places and situations.Consider just one vivid memory.
Look for a place, an object, a friendship, that meant a lot to you. Or the opposite: a place, an object, a friendship that almost destroyed you. Try to focus on just one moment!
Think about a time when you…
Found yourself saying, I do! I won’t! Hell no! I dare you. You couldn’t pay me to. It would be my greatest honor.
Felt an emotion: doubled over with laughter, burst into tears, or lost your cool. Did something you never thought you’d do. Tried to be something or someone you aren’t. Discovered something about yourself, your environment, your family, or the world. Changed your relationship with someone—for better or worse, a little or a lot. Had a secret revealed—by you or someone else. Stood to gain or lose something that mattered to you. Made a tough choice for the right (or wrong) reason.”
“People often want to tell a story that makes them look good, but to the listener it can feel self-indulgent and braggy. “I benched my bodyweight/won a Peabody/sailed a sea/successfully completed a sixteen-hour surgery/memorized a concerto.” Extraordinary accomplishments are a potential setting for your story, but not the story. Telling people about all the big wins in your life is a very easy way to lose your listener. You’re talking at them, you’re not inviting them in.”