相约星期二读书笔记 Tuesday With Morrie Memo

About Emotions (How to face the difficulties)

Morrie talks about detaching himself from the experience. Detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. And then you are able to leave it. If you hold back on the emotions, you’re too busy being afraid of the pain, the grief, the vulnerability of the good emotions. 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. And then you can detach from the bad emotions and value the good emotions. The best way to come through the difficulties is not escaping but penetrating fully into it. You know how it works, you know how it feels, and you know it will never hurt you.

About our culture (To build your own subculture)

When people get threatened, people start looking out only for themselves. 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. So we should develop our own subcultures. It doesn’t mean disregarding every rule of the community. In stead, we should obey the little things. 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. The common problem of our societies is that we don’t believe we are as much alike as we are. We all have the same beginning—birth—and we all have the same end—death. Whatever the stage of life we are in right now, we need other ones’ help. No man is an island, entire of itself. So be compassionate and take responsibility for each other.

About Death

Every day, the Buddhists have a little bird on their shoulders that asks: ‘Is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be?’Everyone knows they’re going to die, but nobody believes it. But actually once you learn how to die, you learn how to live. When you realize you are going to die, you see everything much differently. You come to realize that the things you spend so much time on—all this work you do—might not seem as important. You might have to make room for some more spiritual things. We are too involved in materialistic things which never satisfy us. At the same time, the loving relationships we have, the universe around us, we take these things for granted. Regarding everyday as the end empowers us to discover and value the things we have already gained.