Tuesdays with Morrie

Term Paper-Tuesdays With Morrie

Many people learn many things in many different ways. Most learn in school or church, some learn in asking questions, but I believe the best lessons are taught from a good friend. Tuesdays With Morrie is a true story of the remarkable lessons taught by a dying professor, Morrie Schwartz, to his pupil, Mitch Albom. Morrie teaches Mitch the lessons of life, lessons such as death, fear, aging, greed, marriage, family, society, forgiveness, and a meaningful life. This is a story of a special bond of friendship that was lost for many years, but never forgotten and simply picked up again at a crucial time of both Morrie's and Mitch's lives.

Mitch was flipping through his television stations one night and stopped when he saw his old college professor on "Nightline" talking about his fatal Lou Gehrig's disease. Mitch saw that his life long friend and teacher was dying and knew that he needed to go see him. Morrie was a professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts where Mitch attended college. Morrie was his favorite professor. After college, Mitch never kept in touch with Morrie like he said he would, and felt guilty for not doing so. Seeing Morrie on TV. couldn't have come at a better time in Mitch's life.

Mitch was a columnist for the Detroit Free Press. Everything he did was done on a deadline. His life was always on the go. He didn't take time to appreciate the simple and important things in life such as his wife Janine and her desires to start a family. To Mitch, children would tie him down. Mitch decided to go to Boston to visit his old professor. What started out as a one-day meeting, turned into a four-month class. Mitch and Morrie met once a week on Tuesdays and discussed "the meaning of life."

One of the issues discussed in their Tuesday meetings was the fear of aging. Having Lou Gehrig's disease, the most personal and basic things had been taken from Morrie such as going to the bathroom, wiping his nose, and washing his private parts. He had become dependent on others for nearly everything. Morrie's feeling on this was, "I felt a little ashamed, because our culture tells us we should be ashamed if we can't wipe our own behind. But then I figured, forget what the culture says." It's like going back to being a child again, it's inside all of us, and it's just remembering how to enjoy it.

Society is big on staying and looking young. People are constantly working out, watching what they eat, and getting surgeries such as botox and breast augmentation. Our society is too concerned on looking youthful. Morrie had aging in better perspective, "The young are not wise, they have very little understanding about life. Who wants to live every day when you don't know what's going on? When people are manipulating you, telling you to buy this perfume and you'll be beautiful, or this pair of jeans and you'll be sexy... It's very simple. As you grow you learn more. If you'd stayed at twenty-two, you'd always be ignorant as you were at twenty-two. Aging is not just decay, it's growth." Aging is more than the negative that you're going to die, it's also the positive that you understand you're going to die and that you live a better life because of it.

Another big issue in society is the issue of money and greed. Society tells us that owning more things is good, more money is good, more property is good, and more commercialism is good. The average person is so fogged by all of this; he has no perspective on what's really important. People are so hungry for love and acceptance that they embrace the material things in place of these things. Neither money nor power can make you happy. There is a big confusion in this country of what we want versus what we need. We need food but we don't need a chocolate sundae, we need transportation, but we don't need that brand new sports car. We should all do like what