When Professor Morrie Schwartz was dying from ALS disease, a former student named Mitch Albom, now a sports writer, returned every Tuesday to visit with his old professor. Albom wrote his best-selling book, Tuesday's with Morrie, about the things he learned from his old professor in the weeks leading up to his death. On one of those visits, Morrie said, "Take any emotion - love for a woman, or grief for a loved one, or what I'm going through, fear and pain from a deadly illness. If you hold back on the emotions - if you don't allow yourself to go all the way through them - you can never get to being detached, you're too busy being afraid. You're afraid of the pain, you're afraid of the grief. You're afraid of the vulnerability that loving entails.

"But by throwing yourself into these emotions, by allowing yourself to dive in, all the way, over your head even, you experience them fully and completely. You know what pain is. You know what love is. You know what grief is. And only then can you say, 'All right. I have experienced that emotion. I recognize that emotion. Now I need to detach from that emotion for a moment.'" Morrie stopped and looked me over, perhaps to make sure I was getting this right. "I know you think this is just about dying," he said, "but it's like I keep telling you. When you learn how to die, you learn how to live"