tuesdays with morrie

"I give myself a good cry if I need it.  But then I concentrate on all the good things still in my life.  On the people who are coming to see me.  On the stories I'm going to hear.  On you — if it's Tuesday.  Because we're Tuesday people."

I grinned.  Tuesday people.

"Mitch, I don't allow myself any more self pity than that.  A little each morning, a few tears, that's all."

I thought about all the people I knew who spent many of their waking hours feeling sorry for themselves.  How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self pity.  Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day.

—

If you hold back on the emotions— if you don't allow yourself to go all the way back through them, you can never get to being detached, 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, 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 recognize that emotion.  Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment."

it's been an awful awful friday and it's tough, swallowing your tears and putting on a smile for the rest of the world to see but i'm slowly but surely learning to never let emotions get the better of me, and each day is one more step forward to being less of a terrible person.

the weight of the world is so much heavier than what you think you're going through