Mitch Albom & Morrie Schwartz's Relationship in Tuesdays with Morrie

How would you react if you had only a year to live, and your body would gradually deteriorate in the short remainder of your life? In Tuesdays With Morrie Mitch Albom details his close friendship with his former professor, Morrie Schwartz, who suffers from ALS. Despite Morrie’s condition, he manages to cherish the time he has left and do his best to cope with such a horrible disease. Mitch Albom quotes some of Morrie’s aphorisms throughout the book, and many of these are relevant to everyday people.

For example, Morrie’s aphorism “Seek answers to eternal and ultimate questions about life and death, but be prepared not to find them. Enjoy the search.” is quite relevant to some of my personal experiences in thinking about these deep questions.

Several years ago I was in conversation with one of my friends, Elias. We were discussing something trivial but then, all of a sudden, he asked something along the lines of, “What do you think happens after we die?” | had absolutely no answer to this question except to say that I wasn’t sure, but maybe there was some sort of an afterlife or we just stopped existing.

Over the next few days I spent some time thinking about this question. It’s not as if I hadn’t ever considered it before. I’m sure that most people think about questions like that often throughout their life. But I just hadn’t ever considered it in depth. It seemed to me that many people believed in an afterlife, but I had never seen any convincing evidence for that.

Get quality help now

Writer Lyla

Verified

Proficient in: Free Papers

5 (876)

“ Have been using her for a while and please believe when I tell you, she never fail. Thanks Writer Lyla you are indeed awesome ”

+84 relevant experts are online

Hire writer

But surely, we couldn’t just rot in the ground after death? I sat on my couch for a few minutes, thinking. After pondering this for a bit, I realized it was meaningless to consider the question for very long. There was no way of even close to definitively knowing the answer. It was therefore best to assume that nothing happens after we die. We simply stop existing.

This lead me to a different problem, however, which I am still grappling with. If we likely just stop existing after we die, then what is the meaning of life? How was I supposed to answer that? I realized it was probably just as impossible to answer as the question of what happens after we die. I didn’t think at the time, nor do I think today, that this question has a definitive answer beyond whatever meaning we give to our lives. It was frustrating thinking this though, because it almost made life seem meaningless. And perhaps it is. Perhaps it’s the meaning we give to it that makes it meaningful, but not anything innate to the concept itself.

Ultimately everyone needs to find meaning in their life. Morrie found meaning in his life even as the ALS was destroying his body. But Morrie’s aphorism makes a lot of sense. We think about these questions all the time. We think about the meaning behind our lives, or what happens after we die, or why are we asking these meaningless questions. But often times we don’t have any answers. We certainly don’t have any definitive answers.