Contigno, John Matthew C.

“Tuesdays with Morrie” BSBA FM 1-2

What does death truly mean? One of the very signs of a person to be nearing his death is aging. People become old,
get weak, have body problems, and are most prone to sickness. But death is not something that we must be afraid of,
just as what Morrie taught that “when you know how to die, the feeling of dying, you’ll understand what it means to
live”. Just then that we can realize how we have spent our time on earth, if it was meaningful and are true to a purpose.
Just did Morrie became true to his purpose of being a teacher, he was able to teach what life meant for a dying man, to
teach what silence is, to teach the concept of time, to give wisdom to what is love, to teach the wonders of aging, to be
able to depend on others. Even in the face of death, a person who stays true to his purpose lives a meaningful life.

In aging, Morrie taught that not only do we decay, but we grow. A simple contradiction that gives light to many
things, yes, we decay in the sense that our body is aging, that we are bound to die at some point. But, we do see things
clearly for we have the time, we can see a lot of things clearly as we lay back and not think of a lot of things. But this
does not mean that we cannot feel other things such as rage, sorrow, pity, and mourn for ourselves as we grow old. And
then Morrie taught us to “detach”, detach from all the sadness, the sorrow, the rage, the mourning. Once we do detach
ourselves from these things, we are able to use other time to see what’s ahead; we are able to see things in light. Since,
also if we accept that we are going to die at some point, we change how we view on living, we change how we live, we
give importance to the things that matter once we know that we’ll die. Does silence make people uncomfortable, do we
need the noise and the words to keep us from falling into utter insanity? It has been natural for us to hear since we were
just newborn infants, maybe that is why we are afraid of silence, we are afraid of not interacting we feel comfort in
somebody’s words. We communicate to interact; to be able to create conversations with people has been natural for
humans. But Morrie viewed silence as something that we must not be afraid of, or something that people can also do,
since silence is not caged into only speaking, we can be silent in a lot of ways. Thinking can be silent, we go into a void of
not thinking rather unnecessary thoughts then which make our mind go silent, we can be silent with our actions, since
not everyone should see what we do, and we are silent in a way that we do things for us not for others. Silence can be
comfort, we can think thoroughly, we can keep our thoughts to ourselves, and we can organize them inside us, since not
all things should be said. We always keep running out of time, it is as though we are always chasing towards something.
There are a lot of unnecessary things that we do which makes us think that people are always running out of time, “give
me a minute”, “a second”, we use time for the wrong reasons. Why should we focus our time to the things that don’t
matter once we are dead, instead of using it to interact with others that will make you grow as a person, instead of using
it to create lasting relationships, we use it to finish deadlines, to finish papers. Although some of these things are
important, we must be able to weigh the importance of things from others; since our time is running it is not as though
we should run with it. “We must love one another or die”, Morrie quoted from another author and has been always
saying these phrase until the day he dies. People live, and will be alive because of others, we are not invisible to the eyes
and thoughts of other people, to be able to love, we must live. To be hated, to be liked, to be happy, to be hugged, to be
seen, to be sad, these are some of the things that people do and feel to live, but if we put the concept of loving into
these things we will know that living and loving may be two similar things, for we cannot live without loving; hence “we
must love one another or die”. That is why people need people, we depend on each other. We depend our time for
other people, we cannot love without other people, we are not silent if there is no one to recognize our silence, we
cannot live our purpose for just ourselves but also for other people, that is why people depend on people.

Looking at everything that Morrie stated, he taught all of these things to let a person be able to find happiness. Since
people always looks for the word happiness does not mean it is not there, in fact to be able to find happiness depends
on how you look at these concepts itself. If we look closely, everything boils down to one place, happiness. Rather,
Morrie not only taught us the meaning and the use of silence, time, love, aging, and dependence, but also taught us that
understanding and acknowledging these concepts is also necessary for us to find our “eudaimonia” or happiness per-se.

Email address: jcontignopcs@gmail.com