Real Life Lessons In Mitch Albom's Tuesdays With Morrie

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Mitch Albom’s real-life story of what he learned from his dying former professor, Tuesdays with Morrie, mixes sessions of Mitch being taught life lessons at Morrie’s house, with flashbacks, background, and commentary from Mitch. The lessons are laid out in chronological order, but everything else is interspaced at intervals to correspond with the lessons. It touches on many important topics, but some are more important than the rest. One of those, that reaches throughout multiple sessions, is that in order to understand life, you have to be able to detach from it.
First, the way that Albom structures his sentences to describe this topic, shows that he wants the reader remember and process this information. He is saying that since Morrie is looking death in the eye, he is able to understand life. “But it was also becoming clear to me, … that Morrie was looking at life from a different place than anyone else I knew. A healthier place. A more sensible place. And he was about to die. [It was as] If some mystical clarity of thought came when you looked death in the eye… ” (63-64). Since Morrie is dying, and the disease that is killing him makes it so that he can’t live his life like he used to, meaning he is more detached from normal life than most people will ever be. This allows him just to be able to sit and think about life, as he’s not as caught up in it, as most people are. He can, and does, see the world from a different perspective that allows him to understand it. He can evaluate what really made difference in his life, and from that, figure out what is really important. Doing this, Morrie realizes something that has been said before, but never really taken to heart, that loving others and being happy, make a life meaningful. Therefore, being detached from life gives one a better understanding of it On a less extreme level than death, sometimes just being able to separate oneself from their emotions can allow you to understand life. In one of their sessions, Morrie and Mitch are talking about emotions, and Morrie brings up that in order to detach from emotions you have to experience them, and how this allows you to move on. When Morrie first tells Mitch this, he goes, “But wait, I said. Aren’t you always talking about experiencing life? All the good emotions, all the bad ones? ‘Yes’ Well, how can you do that if you’re detached? ‘Ah. You’re thinking Mitch. But detachment doesn’t mean you don’t let it penetrate you fully. That’s how you are able to leave it’” (103). Morrie goes on to explain that the reason
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This is one of the main messages in the book Tuesdays with Morrie, and is shown throughout the entire book, as one of the other overarching lessons one can learn from the book is that when one is dying, one is learning about life. This is occurring because when one is dying, they are detaching, and can see life from a different perspective. It’s also shown in a more focused way about being willing to detach in order to truly experience emotions. Morrie manages to teach Mitch and inspire him to share his teachings through his detachment allowing Morrie to learn. Every other lesson taught in this book wouldn’t be shared without this

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