book review on Tuesdays with Morrie
It seems like Mitch Albom cares about nothing but love. In Tuesdays with Morrie, he narrated Professor Morrie's last chapter of life, showing the readers what the essence of life is. On the world, regrets, death, family, emotions, fear of aging, money, love, marriage, culture, and forgiveness, the book offered us all the answers. The answers came straight from an old man, standing right in-between on the bridge connecting life and death, taking stock of his whole life. In the past years, he never based his life on exploiting others. Instead, he brought people care and love. Even in his final days, he wanted to be a "teacher to the last". How could we ignore kindness like this?
Mitch Albom also wrote The Five People You Meet in Heaven, a book about different forms of love, and Time Keeper, which seems to be a book about the true meaning about time. Put all those books together, you may find that Tuesdays with Morrie is the essence and a condensed life, strong and intense. While the other books just elaborated on the topics in TwM, like love, time, forgiveness and so on and on, diffusing the fragrance into your life, reminding you to stay calm and grateful.
Yet, many people find Mitch's books making them embarrassed and squeamish. "Affected","chicken soup", they sneered. Some people listed reasons like "We cannot live merely on ideal. Even Morrie himself depended on this book to pay his medical fees. Isn't that ironic?" While others never read this book carefully and just depreciated it because other people did this. As for those who accused Morrie of writing this book to make money, I'd like to say, don't forget what Morrie said in the book, which is he would not exploit others. He wrote this book to tell us how to deal with all the difficulties we'd meet in our own lives. Or to be precise, he encouraged Mitch to write this "thesis" to help his student live a better life. He was really a "teacher to the last".
Maybe it's because I myself am going to become a teacher this August that I value this book so much. I am not a teacher yet, and I'm really disoriented. What does it mean to be a teacher. In Little Big Master, a movie based on a true story, the main character said that teaching means influencing others' lives with yours. It sounds great, but how could I influence my students with my own life. I mean, I am still young myself and I am confused about life myself. How could I tell them how to live when I don't know it myself. In desperate and pushed by the heavy responsibility on my shoulders, I turned to books. I read Excellent Sheep before TwM, which told me that a good teacher doesn't only move knowledge from one head to another; a good teacher is a mentor who knows how to challenge his students to think about their own lives, about what they want and how to pursue their OWN purposes of life. That's much better. I feel a little bit relieved. It sounds like easier to pose questions than to answer questions. Yet TwM told me that it would better if you can inspire your students to come up with questions on their own. Morrie showed me how.
Form the perspective of a to-be-teacher, I love Tuesdays with Morrie and I'll recommend it to my future students. Yes, we cannot live merely on ideal. But what is a problem is not we have nothing but ideal but that we are running after materialism so eagerly that we don't even think about the meaning of it. One concept mentioned by Professor Morrie impressed me a lot, which is that what makes us feel alive is not the big house nor the nice car but love. I guess those who depreciate this idea will find it true when they stand on the final bridge between life and death themselves.
