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scrapofpaper"Morrie talked about his most fearful moments, when he felt his chest locked in heaving surges or when he 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 those 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 life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don't let those tears come 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 with the fear of what those words might do to the relationship.
"Morrie's approach was exactly the opposite. Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won't hurt you. It will only help. If you will let the fear inside, if you put 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 it completely--but eventually be able to say, 'All right, that was my moment with loneliness. I'm not afraid of being 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."
--Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
"Actually he was a pessimist, and like all pessimists, a ridiculously unobservant man."
--Vladimir Nabokov, An Affair of Honor
"My happiness has a sad face, so sad that for years I took it for my unhappiness and drove it away."
--Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
"Human beings pass me on the street, and I want to reach out and strum them as if they were guitars. Sometimes all humanity strikes me as lonely. I just want to reach out and stroke someone, and say There, there, it's all right, honey. There, there, there."
--Sandra Cisneros, "Never Marry a Mexican"
"At both ends of life men needed nourishment: a breast--a shrine."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald
"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,--who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from 'idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Saint Terre,' to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terrer,' a Saunterer,--a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret to successful sauntering."
--Henry David Thoreau
"I am human; nothing human is strange to me."
--Terence
"I thought about how often this was needed in everyday life. How we feel lonely, sometimes to the point of tears, but we don't let those tears come 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 with the fear of what those words might do to the relationship.
"Morrie's approach was exactly the opposite. Turn on the faucet. Wash yourself with the emotion. It won't hurt you. It will only help. If you will let the fear inside, if you put 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 it completely--but eventually be able to say, 'All right, that was my moment with loneliness. I'm not afraid of being 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."
--Mitch Albom, Tuesdays with Morrie
"Actually he was a pessimist, and like all pessimists, a ridiculously unobservant man."
--Vladimir Nabokov, An Affair of Honor
"My happiness has a sad face, so sad that for years I took it for my unhappiness and drove it away."
--Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
"Human beings pass me on the street, and I want to reach out and strum them as if they were guitars. Sometimes all humanity strikes me as lonely. I just want to reach out and stroke someone, and say There, there, it's all right, honey. There, there, there."
--Sandra Cisneros, "Never Marry a Mexican"
"At both ends of life men needed nourishment: a breast--a shrine."
--F. Scott Fitzgerald
"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,--who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from 'idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Saint Terre,' to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terrer,' a Saunterer,--a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret to successful sauntering."
--Henry David Thoreau
"I am human; nothing human is strange to me."
--Terence
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