I finally managed to finish my 3rd mitch albom's book, "the five people you meet in heaven". I feel it's better than "Tuesdays with Morrie", but "for one more day" is probably my most favourite. What i like about this book is how the author puts the important events that occur on different birthdays of Eddie in between each person he meets in heaven to show how they are related.
"five" is about this guy called Eddie, a maintenance worker at Ruby Pier, an amusement park, after he died in an accident, met 5 people in heaven, each telling him their stories, teaching him a lesson and let him understand how and why he lived, and the reason why certain people have appeared in his life. The story also shows that everybody's life is intersecting...everyone is inter-linked, in one way or another.
"All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time..."
"No stories sit by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river."
"The world is full of stories. But the stories are all one."
Eddie met 5 people in Heaven: The Blue Man, Captain, Ruby, Marguerite and Tala. There are 5 lessons i've learnt thru him:
1. There are no random acts and we are all connected. You can no more separate one life from the other than you can separate a breeze from the wind. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole. Fairness, does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young. People are drawn to babies and funerals because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.
2. "Sacrifice. You made one. I made one. We all make them. But you were angry over yours. You kept thinking about what you lost. You didn't get it. Sacrifice is a part of life. It's
supposed to be. It's not something to regret. It's something to
aspire to. Little sacrifices. Big sacrifices. A mother works so her son can go to school. A daughter moves home to take care of her sick father. A man goes to war... Sometimes when you sacrifice something precious, you're not really losing it. You're just passing it to someone else. You lost something, but you gained something as well. You just don't know it yet."
3. "Learn to forgive. Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks the person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves. No one is born with anger. And when we die, the soul is freed of it. But now, here, in order to move on, you must understand why you felt what you did, and why you no longer need to feel it."
4. "Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, that's all. You can't see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it. Life has to end. Love doesn't."
5. And the last lesson...you read the book and find out for yourself, folks.
Here are some other meaningful quotes from the book:
"The running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets."
"Take one story, viewed from 2 different angles. It is the same day, the same moment, but one angle ends happily, and the other ends badly."
"Strangers, are just family you have yet to come to know."
"Young men go to war. Sometimes because they have to. Sometimes because they want to. Always, they feel they are supposed to. This comes from the sad layered stories of life, which over the centuries have seen courage confused with picking up arms, and cowardice confused with laying them down."
"War is no game. If there's a shot to be made, you make it. No guilt. No hesitation. You fire and you fire and you don't think about who you're shootin' or killin' or why. You want to come home again, you just fire, you don't think.
It's the thinking that gets you killed."
"I took you leg...to save your life."
"No one gets left behind."
"All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jadded little pieces, beyond repair. Neglect. Violence. Silence."
"Things that happen before you are born still affect you. And people who come before your time still affect you as well.
We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our work places, where we spend so much time-we often think it began with our arrival. That's not true."
"Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them-a mother's approval, a father's nod-are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives."
"People say they 'find' love, as if it were an object hidden by a rock. But love takes many forms, and it is never the same for any man and women. What people find then is a
certain love. A grateful love. A deep but quiet love, above all else, irreplaceable love."
"Love, like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive."
"You have peace, when you make it with yourself."
And finally, the most important one...
"No life is a waste, the only time we waste is the time we spent thinking we are alone."
&its not what you think
6:40 am
