So I read this book Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom – a real life account of a sociology professor’s last days of suffering with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease). It is mostly about realizations he makes as he is dying and my favorite quote is “When you learn how to die, you learn how to live.” That we should live each day like it could be our last. Some of his aphorisms really inspired me. Knowing his days were very limited, he becomes very clear about what makes for a happy, meaningful life.
“The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.”
“If you are always battling against getting older, you’re always going to be unhappy, because it will happen anyhow.”
“This is your time to be in your thirties. I had my time to be in my thirties, and now is my time to be seventy-eight. . . . The truth is, part of me is every age . . . I am every age up to my own . . . How can I be envious of where you are – when I’ve been there myself?”
“You remember what I said about finding a meaningful life? . . . 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 fact is, there is no foundation, no secure ground, upon which people may stand today if it isn’t the family. It’s become quite clear to me as I’ve been sick. If you don’t have the support and love and caring and concern that you get from a family, you don’t have much at all. Love is so supremely important. As our great poet Auden said, ‘Love each other or perish.’”
“Without love, we are birds with broken wings.”
“ . . . a loved one is so important. You realize that, especially when you’re in a time like I am, when you’re not doing so well. Friends are great, but friends are not going to be here on a night when you’re coughing and can’t sleep and someone has to sit up all night with you, comfort you, try to be helpful.”
“ . . . there are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don’t respect the other person, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don’t know how to compromise, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can’t talk openly about what goes on between you, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don’t have a common set of values in life, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike. And the biggest one of those values . . . your belief in the importance of your marriage.”
“People are only mean when they are threatened.”
“That’s what we’re all looking for. A certain peace with the idea of dying. If we know, in the end, that we can ultimately have that peace with dying, then we can finally do the really hard thing. Make peace with living.”
“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 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.”
One concept discussed by Morrie is “detachment.” Not clinging to things, emotions. This is his thought on the key to detachment regarding emotions (love, fear, pain).
“. . . detachment doesn’t mean that you don’t let the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That’s how you are able to leave it. . . . 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 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.”
Those are some of the quotes that inspired me to write On Love (see following post) last night. It also comes from a certain self-awareness of my apprehension to get close to another person. I wrote it as an affirmation to myself, not directed toward anyone, nor referencing any experience I have or have had with any one person. It would be my goal, I suppose, to truly live what I have written.
On Love by Heathaer Bonea
If one has a complete sense of self-love, self-ownership, self-reliance, there is no holding back. There is no fear of loving others that that love will not be returned.
To feel complete power over one-self is to know that giving love without expectation or even hope of receiving it in return is the most powerful thing a person can do.
I love someone, give them all of me. And though that love may not be returned, it is not wasted. The world is filled with an immense vastness of love. We are filled with an immense vastness of love. It is a well that cannot be depleted. Though many people have it tightly and efficiently capped so they may not even be aware of its presence within them, yet the seal has no physical reality to it. It exists only in their perception. The love, though they cannot feel or perceive it, flows freely still.
I love someone and though they may not consciously return it, it is my gift to them. I delight in the nourishment it provides their soul.
Though they may choose not to receive my love, I am grateful to have shared myself with another person on this earth and take comfort in the knowledge that the web of my love has been woven through another person’s life.
That love when given freely is not depleted. It is grown, like a wildfire in a forest. It is a silent fire spreading through the world bringing not destruction nor consumption but an eternal spring, a flush of color to the tiny rose blooming within us all.
I love someone and though they may not consciously return it, I feel it flowing through them, tapping into the well of love within them and back through me out into the universe.
For love truly freely given is a gift. Love given with the hope or expectation of return is offered with a price tag, an expectation of a return on an investment.
Love freely given is a gift to myself that I may grow. It is a gift to the universe that it may be filled with light. It is a gift to an other that they grow and feel the lightness of their being.
Grief over the rejection of one’s love is in fact not. It is grief over the loss of what one had expected in return for their love. That grief is born from a love that was not truly freely given.
That which we mistake for grief over rejection of our love is grief over the loss of companionship, shared experience, memories that will never be created, occasions that will never come to pass, the sight of dreams we had pinned our hopes upon fluttering to the ground. This grief is real, but it is temporal, just as the concepts which are grieved are temporal aspects of our existence. With each passing moment, the future is slightly adjusted. Each passing moment brings with it the uncertain effect it will have on our lives.
Though we perceive the losses due to rejection acutely, they are no more profound than the innumerable losses sustained with the uncertainty of each momentary unfolding of our future.
If we see that we grieve the loss of a future that was uncertain to begin with, perhaps it will be easier to accept and let go.
The love itself is never lost. It lives on in others. It is built upon with each new person they love and carries them through the rest of their lives.
