Tuesdays with Morrie

by Mitch Albom

Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.

I'm often asked what the biggest lesson more taught me. For all of his memorable aphorisms we've written down and highlighted and underlined, twice, I'm not sure his lessons always came through his words. I'm still moved by the moments I watched Morrie's compassion and empathy as he cried for volatile situations and war on the other side of the world, or how he counseled those who came to visit him about their own problems. I later asked him why he didn’t just take their sympathy and revel in it, and he got upset. “Why would I take from people like that?” he said. “Taking makes me feel like I’m dying. Giving makes me feel like I’m living.” Giving is living. It's a phrase I never wrote in this book. But one that I take with me as, thanks to Morrie, I have gotten more involved with charity, community, and family. Giving is living is how I approach my work with the nonprofits I founded, SAY Detroit and A Hole in the Roof, which operates the Have Faith Haiti Mission & Orphanage in Port-au-Prince. I'm reminded of that every monthly visit to the orphanage. Do you feel that same sense of tingling, of spark, of true fulfillment when you give of yourself, instead of when you are showering yourself with...stuff?