preview

Adversity In Tuesdays With Morrie

Good Essays
Open Document

When most people face adversity, they give up. They see it as a challenge that can’t be overcome and rather than finding a way around it they flee in fear of the consequences. Usually, this is because we lack experience and knowledge of how to overcome the issue. But as we age and as our condition in life worsens through adversity, we gain the necessary knowledge to not overcome it, but to find comfort and acceptance in it. Through the telling of Morrie Schwartz’s life and teachings, his acceptance of adversity leads to his own personal enlightenment on living life they way it ought to lived in Tuesdays with Morrie. Morrie faces one of the hardest things that come with old age, the weakening of the body. However unlike what’s typical, his …show more content…

Most people wouldn’t want to live through his disease; they would spend all their time wallowing away in grief and in pain. And while both of those are acceptable responses to discovering a terminal illness, Morrie takes a different approach. What differentiates Morrie from everyone else in the world is his ability to take something as terrible as Lou Gehrig’s disease and use it to his own advantage. While his condition worsens, he takes the time to reflect back on his life. He confesses regrets, recalls the best and worst times of his life and focuses on the positive aspects of life rather than the negative. While it may be hard to initially provoke the thoughts regarding happiness and enlightenment, those thoughts tend to stay imprinted to the brain because ‘when you realize you are going to die, you see everything differently” (Albom 83). Morrie views life as opportunity during his dying days. Rather than obsessing over everything he didn’t do, he shares what he did and how life should be lived. He believed in the saying “tension of opposites” and after considering the concept, I’ve found that to me, living life in accordance to the tension of opposites is living where life pulls you forward and back. There should never be a moment where life is fully constant. There …show more content…

Living through hardships can tend to be detrimental, where these events shape us in a way that can’t be described as anything but bad. But after reading Morrie’s life story and seeing what he went through, I see that a person doesn’t truly live until they’ve dealt with something that hurts them in some way. But they can’t just go through the difficult moments. They have to learn and acknowledge those moments before truly understanding how to live and that pitying yourself does nothing but promote more negativity. Morrie said that he didn’t allow himself to pity because he “concentrated on the good things still in his life” (Albom 57) rather than spend all day worrying about his hardships and pain. He exemplifies the ideal way to trudge through painful moments, understanding that it may be difficult to live life without self-pity but also doable. One of the other hardest parts of death and facing it is the fear of relationships ending. Once we die, we lose our connections with people because we aren’t physically able to maintain them, but “death ends a life, not a relationship” (Albom 174). The worst feeling possible is knowing that you’ve lost a relationship. It’s even worse when you know that there’s no way it can be repaired. But

Get Access