I must admit that even though I had heard a lot about "Tuesdays with Morrie" and had even caught a few scenes from the TV movie that came out of it, I picked up this book by the same author Mitch Albom with half expectation to see a cliché on the importance of life (purely going by the title). And, just like many other things in your bucketlist, this one was still pending. I thought of picking it up as my travel companion on my 18 hour flight to India.
Let me start the review by quoting from the book "Life's book is hard to understand: Why couldst thou not remain at school?"
Mitch Albom has an unpretentious writing style, where simple words and situations become his vehicle to deliver the big truths of life. It is certainly an art form, given that language often fails to describe subtleties of wisdom. His plots are simple yet powerful. A reader finds strong identification with condition of the protagonist going through normal motions of life - childhood, adolescence and adulthood. And, yet there is something very potent in his story telling that lends another depth to every scene.
(Hoping to not include any spoilers)....
This story is one of despair and rejection, where the protagonist is at the ultimate juncture of life - the one between life and death. He chooses death over life and just as he is about to leave this world, he has an encounter of a lifetime. One may consider this encounter a meeting between two people - one of them lost to death and one about to go. My interpretation is that it really was the protagonist’s encounter with his own self - a “self” that in his case is ridden with guilt and shame.
We rarely have encounters like this because we surround ourselves in so much noise. In this cacophony, the voice we hear the least is our own heart. Most of the time we actively seek to shut it up as it interferes with our mind. It's for this reason the following narrative rings true in every word. It’s about an event in the book where the protagonist learns “what's an echo” and it goes like this. An echo is persistence of sound after the source has stopped. What is required for an echo? The sound must bounce off something. When can you hear an echo? When it's quiet and other sounds are absorbed. The echo of our heart needs the disarming mirror of pure love to bounce off, a love that is void of ego, the love a mother has for her children for instance.
{In the text below – a mother is a symbolic reference to a parent that selflessly loves you}
This story revolves around a son and his mother. Delicately woven and beautifully told, how a son realizes that his rejection of his mother was really a rejection of his own self. The subtleties of the story have resonance in the wistfulness that lingers in every man’s heart. The sweet-n-sour relationship that we share with our mother starts with sweet adoration post birth and then sourness adds to it as we grow up. And, we are all in such a hurry to grow up. We are always trying to impress someone – an elusive parent, a partner, or a friend, as if we draw our self-worth from them. But, a mother does not make you work for her love. For her, acceptance of you as your true self comes naturally. Perhaps, why we take it as her weakness and detest her for that. Since her pure love reflects the voice of our own heart, we try to ignore her. In a dialogue in the story, the protagonist’s mother declares that a child embarrassed by his mother is just a child who hasn't lived long enough.
Your heart always carries the burden of your past and the interest on it accrues over time – shading your self-worth. You can run from all but yourself. And, as the story unfolds, the reader realizes that the past always catches up. ( here I’d interject an observation – as children we have all put on our parent’s shoes one time or the other trying to look like them, then we spend our adolescence avoiding looking like them, in the attempt to please the elusive others, till we really fit in our parents shoes to find out that fitting in those shoes in not just a matter of size but a matter of depth – the depth of a life lived.)
As the book says "Going back to something is harder than you think". Fortunate are those that get another chance to make amends, to listen to your heart in silence of the purest love and reflect on what matters for real. What is real is a mother’s love. Where all others fail, a mother’s love holds you above the whirlwind of life. It gives you courage when you fail, it gives you direction when you get lost. She stays with you forever ( even if you stay with her or not.) After all, an echo persists after the source is gone and we hear it when it is quiet and all other sounds are absorbed.
Another touching declaration in the book is that "Behind all your stories is always your mother's story because hers is where yours begin". We take a lot from our mother – life, love and life’s lessons -rarely giving her back her due. As author says “Your mother and father pass through you to your children” – in more ways than one, your relationship with your mother passes on to your relationship with your children.
Love your mother as she’s loved you....
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p.s:
I read it somewhere that it matters not the day you were born or the day you died but the days in-between. It's this in-between that defines us. The author says "You can find something really important in an ordinary minute." Yet, we spend so many ordinary minutes in ordinary pursuits. As the protagonist’s mother says in the book "It's such a shame to waste time. We always think we have so much of it." If these ordinary minutes define our existence and the value of it, what are the pursuits that we want them to be filled with.
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