"Love is the only rational act.” - Mitch Albom
If you’re having a bad day or week, read a Mitch Albom book. Any of them are guaranteed to raise your spirits. Somehow he captures the real meaning of life in all of them, memoir, fiction or nonfiction. He is most famous for Tuesdays With Morrie, but any of them will do.
Morrie Schwartz was one of Mitch’s favorite college professors. They developed a close relationship while Mitch was enrolled at Brandeis University in Massachusetts. Before he graduated, Mitch vowed that he would stay in touch. That didn’t happen until some years later when he caught Morrie being interviewed by Ted Kopel on Nightline. Morrie had ALS and was on the show to talk about how the illness impacted his life. After that, Mitch arranged to see Morrie every Tuesday until he passed away. In his mid-thirties at the time Mitch was a sports journalist, driven to succeed. What he learned from his college professor put his life on a whole new trajectory. “Yeah, seeing him dying really shook me up. And I think when you’re shaken-up you’re open to thinking differently than you had before.”
Mitch attributes the eighteen Tuesdays he spent with Morrie to how he began paying attention to his inner guidance system. Before that he took his cues from the outside.
Mitch now believes that everyone has an intuitive voice that will direct their path, if they choose to listen.
“But most people don’t go that deep. They don’t want to listen to that voice. I think it also lies dormant in some. I think everybody has an inner compass that can guide them, but it needs to be activated by the people you surround yourself with. And, you know, if you surround yourself with a bunch of selfish people, that part of you probably won’t be activated.”
The older man's presence is what Mitch needed to flip that switch on. “Yeah! Absolutely! He launched that for me, and fortunately I took it from there.”
When Mitch re-established his friendship with Morrie, he was reminded of what truly matters under the big blue dome. He let go of his drive to succeed and began living from his heart. No longer trying to force his ambitions to materialize, he began walking through the doors that appeared on his path.
Personally, I’ve done a lot of pushing to try to make things happen in my life. I was hopeful that Mitch could set me straight on how productive that actually is. I asked him if pushing verses allowing things to come to us blocks what we are in pursuit of.
“Oh absolutely. Yeah. That’s true for all things in life. Sometimes you can’t force it. You have to take your foot off of the gas and you have to let it happen. That’s hard to believe because you always think the harder I work, the more likely I am to have what I want, but that’s not always the case. I have found that sometimes you just have to lighten up a bit and it’ll come to you.”
That is not the only wisdom he learned from his Tuesday visits. Once Morrie asked Mitch: what did he do for his community? Mitch answered that he wrote checks. His mentor told him flat out that anyone can write a check. Mitch had been given a voice and needed to use it for something other than aggrandizing himself. Mitch didn’t take those words lightly.
After his friend died Mitch wrote a memoir about the life lessons he learned from him. Tuesdays With Morrie wasn’t expected to be big, but Mitch was hopeful the profits could pay off Morrie’s medical bills. His writing was fueled by love. I asked Mitch if working with the energy of the heart makes a project take on a life of its own. “I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that was certainly the case for me,” he responded. Since its publication Tuesdays With Morrie has sold over 18.5 million copies and is the best selling memoir of all time.
Morrie’s influence is what led Mitch to become involved with philanthropic ventures. He says he’s not calculating with charitable moves. He doesn’t go looking for a place to donate his time or money to. It’s more like he comes across a need and fills it. For example, in 2006 when the Super Bowl was played in Detroit, he learned that the homeless were being rounded-up off the streets and put into a shelter with a big screen TV. It was being called a “Super Bowl Party.”
“The city was acting like they were doing a good thing by giving homeless people a place to stay for a couple of days. But on the following Monday morning they would be kicked back out onto the streets. It really incensed me so I went and spent a night at a homeless shelter. I wrote a story about it. I wasn’t meaning to do anything more than to express my frustration with the situation. The crazy thing is that so many donations flooded in to address the problem – over $300,000 - that I created something with it. I didn’t sit around and think: ‘Well let me start a charity to address Detroit’s most vulnerable populations.’ It happened because of the column I wrote. That’s how Say Detroit was formed.”
The Caring and Sharing Mission, a struggling orphanage in Haiti, was another problem put in front of Mitch to be addressed. After a massive earthquake ravaged Haiti in 2010, the pastor who ran it reached out to him for help. All the commercial flights to Haiti were canceled and he needed a flight down there. He had to know if the orphans’ home had been destroyed. Mitch was able to arrange a small plane to fly the pastor there and decided to go with him. Fortunately, the orphanage and its residents were spared.
“I found myself there and the kids were just so – just so amazing. A couple of them took my hand and started walking me around. I sort of felt like I was being led - laughs - literally led to get involved in it. I’m more involved with the orphanage than most anything now. I had never even seen Haiti before or anything. I just found myself in circumstances where I saw something that moved me. I felt like I could do something and a little thing turned into a big thing, and it kind of went from there.”
When Mitch learned that the 84-year-old pastor had no money to run the Caring and Sharing Mission he volunteered to take it over. He changed its name to Have Faith Haiti, inspired partly by his book, Have a Little Faith. “I naively told him that I would run it. I thought how hard could it be?”
Mitch admits to making every mistake a guy who had no children can make.“But you know, love overrides a lot of mistakes.”
When one of the orphans became ill with a rare cancerous brain tumor, Mitch discovered that Haiti didn’t have the resources to help her. To give five-year-old Chika Jeune a fighting chance Mitch and his wife, Janine, moved her to Detroit for treatment. “She became our daughter for two years while we did everything we could to help her survive.”
Chika’s death in 2017 devastated Mitch and Janine. They had become a family. Chika had given them the gift of being her parents.“I was very frustrated when she died. I was very angry. I still haven’t really gotten fully around it, but I’ve tried to take the approach that we didn’t lose a little girl, we were given one, you know?” Once again Mitch used his voice to write a memoir. The proceeds from the sale of Finding Chika go to support Have Faith Haiti.
Life goes on for the Alboms. Every month Mitch flies down to spend time at Have Faith Haiti. He loves the children who are being raised there. In 2022, a baby named Nadie was brought to the orphanage. She was six months old and barely weighed 7 pounds. They were told she had been fed little beyond sugar water since her birth. She was lethargic, barely responsive and had conjunctivitis. They immediately took her to the hospital where blood work confirmed malnourishment and anemia. After conferring with doctors in the U.S., Mitch and Janine decided the best thing would be to bring her to their home in Detroit to address her life-threatening issues. Today Nadie has recovered from her shaky start and is thriving. Another door had been opened to walk through. So that is what they did.
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Text and artwork © Sue Shanahan
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