Life Lessons

Appetizer - information about book

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler, Life Lessons, Scribner 2000.

Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross is one of the famous authors today. She was born in Zurich, Switzerland, and her best selling first book is On Death and Dying, 1969. I read this book when I lived in Germany, and I like this genre because this kind of books give a message, wisdom of life and time to think about my life. Therefore, I choose this book, Life Lessons, and I am reading now.
This book is the result of a close collaboration between Elisabeth and David Kessler. The case histories and personal experiences are taken from their lectures, workshops, and discussions with patients and families. I think that this book is easy to understand, but it is not easy to understand about real meaning. That is the problem of this kind of books. In this quarter, I think this is the biggest challenge that I have to do.

Main Dish
Chapter 1 – Authenticity
A man who is in danger or other situations that seems like obstacles in his happy life usually thinks about his past life and tries to find his authenticity, which means the essence or something that makes him the real him. There are so many steps to find meaning of his life, but the author believes that the main important step is to get to know himself. That means to know his essence. The author shows some examples that make easy to understand and think about reader’s authenticity. We have to know how to define ourselves and who we are. That is the first step.

Chapter 2 – Love
In human life, love is basically needed because loving is a human nature. Everybody wants to be beloved, not loving others, so we can think that our love is very selfish and conditional. When we were children, our love was not conditional. At that time, our love was unconditional, but times later, we are going to get more conditions for loving others until end of our journey by death. Maybe, some people are going to find unconditional love, and some people are not. Surely, our love is conditional, but we have to find unconditional love because that is the real love. Love may come from unexpected places, such as children.

Dessert

There are two main ideas that I read. The first one is Authenticity, and the second one is Love. At first, I want to change the first chapter’s title, like Truth of your life or To Get to Know Yourself. It is the most important step to understand our life. Even though that is a basic, it is the most difficult step in our life. We have a lot of lies in our life, and there is not us; it means that we cannot know ourselves without truth.
Actually, I think that human nature is lying or People of the Lie.( This book was written by Dr. Scottpeck. I recommend this one. It is good for to understand human nature and to be a religious, but surely, it is a dangerous book.) Somebody says that there are two kinds of lies. One is White Lie and the other is Black Lie. To be a liar for your peaceful life or to be honest even somebody swears at you in your whole life. What is better? I think there is no exception. I agree with Emmanuel Kant. Anyway, it does not matter. We have to watch ourselves except our lies, and we have to find our essence, and that makes our life better because we are there. That is real.
Now, I want to focus on love. I checked some dictionaries about love. The American Heritage Dictionary, which is big and thick-in my opinion, it usually means that it is the most famous dictionary-defines “love” as “an intense affection for another person based on familiar or personal ties.”
I want to focus on the key phrase “based on.” This phrase implies that we love someone because they fulfill a condition that we require before we can love others. How many times I heard or said, “I love you because you are so cute;” or “I love you because you take good care of me.” Our love is not only conditional, it is also mercurial. We love based on feelings and emotions that can change from one moment to the next.
Can anyone really comprehend “unconditional” love? It seems the love that parents have for their children is as close to unconditional love as we can get without conditions in our lives. A parent’s love does not stop when they do not feel love for their children. Therefore, many theologians usually compare that to God’s love. This is similar to God’s love for us, but we shall see. Love is real, but it is also surreal because love transcends the human definition, and that is hard for us to comprehend.
As we know, if we love someone, we have to do something for him or her because that is the proof of our love, but we only want to be beloved, not loving. Love is not receiving. Love is giving, so we have to love and give our truth and heart without conditions. We know that a best friend is someone who loves you when you forget to love yourself.
It is obviously quite difficult to be no longer loved when we are still in love, but it is incomparably more painful to be loved when we ourselves no longer love. Therefore, we have to decide; love or not, to be or not to be. It is very simple like a door. A door must either be shut or open. We have to make a choice, love or not. For that, we have to know our essence.
Everybody wants to be a nice person. That is the human nature. As we know, we are not perfect, but we want to be perfect. We have a limit, but we know infinite, so we are doing our best to be perfect. Unfortunately, without powerful and unlimited one, which called God or spiritual something, like devil or ghost, we cannot get perfection. However, that is important to us because that makes a difference between human and animal.
Everybody is not perfect. We are not human beings. I think that the definition is wrong. We are not human beings, but we are human becoming. Therefore, we have a chance to know ourselves without lies in our life, and it will be a real substance of us, and finally, we are going to know the meaning of our life. At that time, we can love each other and love ourselves. “Ich liebe dich weil du du bist.”