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"What I'm doing now," he continued, his eyes still closed, "is detaching myself from the experience."
Detaching yourself?
"Yes. Detaching myself. And this is important-not for someone like me, who is dying, but for someone like you, who is perfectly healthy. Learn to detach."
He opened his eyes. He exhaled. "You know what the Buddhists say? Don't cling to things, because everything is impermanent."
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 the experience penetrate you. On the contrary, you let it penetrate you fully. That's how you are able to leave it."
I'm lost.
"Take any emotion-love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. 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 pain, you're afraid of the grief, you're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.
"But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by 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 you can say, "all right. I've experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment."
Morrie stopped and looked at me over, perhaps to make sure I was getting this right.
"I know you think this is just about dying," he said. "But it's just like I keep telling you. When you learn how to die, you learn how to live."
Morrie talked about his most fearful moments, when he felt his chest locked in heaving surges or when wasn't sure where his next breath would come from. These were horrifying times, he said, and his first emotions were horror, fear, anxiety. But once he recognized the feel of these emotions, their texture, their moisture, the shiver down the back, the quick flash of heat that crosses your brain-then he was able to say, "Okay. This is fear. Step away from it. Step away."
I thought about how often this was needed in everyday lift. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don't let these tears come out because we are not supposed to cry. Or how we feel a surge of love for a partner but we don't say anything because we're frozen of the fear of what those words might do to the relationship.
Morrie's approach was exactly the opposite. Turn on the faucets. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won't hurt you. It will only help. If you let the fear inside, if you pull it on like a familiar shirt, then you can say to yourself, "All right, it's just fear, I don't have to let it control me. I see it for what it is."
Same for loneliness: you let go, let the tears flow, feel completely-but eventually be able to say, "All right, it was my moment with loneliness. I'm not afraid of feeling lonely, but now I'm going to put that loneliness aside and know that there are other emotions in the world, and I'm going to experience them as well."
"Detach." Morrie said again.
Passage from 'tuesdays with Morrie', author, Mitch Albom.
An amazing, and inspirational book. Wonderful life lessons through the eyes of a college professor, Morrie Schwartz.
"So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half asleep, even when they are busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning."
