the five people you meet in heaven

When reading a book, I normally would highlight passages that catch my attention. If I don’t have my handy pen with me, I resort to folding the tip of the page so I know which pages I can go back to. After reading a book, I have this habit of going back to those passages and reread them … these highlights either go in sync with my principles or better yet challenges the things that I believe in. I find adventure in this habit of mine since I’m able to reflect on who the person I am.

I’ve been here in Manila for almost 2 months now and I only have another month to go before I go back to India. Surprisingly, amidst the busy schedule that I have here, I still was able to finish 6 books in the span of 2 months. I guess you really find time to do what you have passion for.

If there is a book that can define the person I am now there’s no doubt in my mind that I’d choose the book by Mitch Albom, the five people you meet in heaven. Incidentally, he is also the brains behind Tuesdays with Morrie.

Almost all of the insights and reflections in this book go with the things that I believe in. I felt at home with the book. It's like the feeling you get when you just met someone and for some cosmic vibe you just click with that person? That’s exactly how I felt while reading it. It was as if my clothes were taken off me and I read all naked truths about myself. But what really elated me was the fact that the book collaborates with my main principle in life that is: Complexities in life are but simple equations that have uncomplicated answers.

Let me share with you my favorite assertions in the book … I hope some of the passages would inspire you … I could also only hope that I was at least instrumental in giving you inspiration :)

• All endings are also beginnings … we just don’t know them at that time.

• Had he known his death was imminent he would have gone somewhere else. Instead he did what he always does. He went about his dull routine as if all the days of the world were still to come.

• As far as he could tell when your time came, it came and that was that. You might say something smart on your way out, but you might just as easily say something stupid.

• “There are five people you meet in heaven” the Blue Man said suddenly. “Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not know the reason at that time but that’s what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth.”

• People think of heaven as paradise garden, a place where they can float in clouds and raze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless.

• “There will be others for you too … some you know some you didn’t but they all crossed your path before they died. And they altered it forever.”

• Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should? It is 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.

• Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know.

• 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 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.

• Holding anger is 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.