I read Tuesdays with Morrie on a cold January night, wrapped in a blanket, sitting in the same room where I’d been working fifteen-hour days for the past two weeks. I wasn’t planning to read it. I picked it up almost by accident – someone had left it on the table, and I just needed five minutes away from my laptop. Those five minutes turned into three hours, and by the time I put it down, something had shifted quietly inside me. Not dramatically. Not like a revelation. More like the way the sky changes colour just before sunrise – you don’t catch the exact moment it happens, but suddenly everything looks different.
For those who haven’t read it: Mitch Albom, a journalist, reconnects with his old college professor, Morrie Schwartz, who is dying from ALS – a disease that is slowly shutting his body down, one muscle at a time. And every Tuesday, Mitch visits him. They talk. About love, about work, about family, about fear, about death. Morrie, who can barely lift his arms by the end, somehow ends up being the most alive person in the room. That’s the whole book. And somehow, it’s everything.
I kept stopping while reading, not because it was slow, but because certain lines would land somewhere deep and I needed a moment before I could move ahead. And almost every time I paused, I found myself thinking – I’ve seen this. Not in a book. In the field.
Morrie says something early in the book that I couldn’t shake. He says we live our lives chasing things – money, status, the next milestone and we never stop to ask if those are the things we actually want. He had spent his whole career in academia, and it took a terminal illness for the world to finally sit down and listen to him. That hit me differently than it might hit someone sitting in a corporate office. Because in the field, I’ve seen it too – communities that have been chasing government schemes for decades, filling forms, attending meetings, ticking boxes – and then one day, in one conversation, they pause and say, “But what do we actually need?” And that pause, that one honest question, sometimes unlocks more in an hour than years of programme implementation could.
We do the same thing in our projects. We’re so busy with activity reports, MIS entries, and quarterly targets that we forget to stop and ask – is this actually working? Are we solving the right problem? Morrie didn’t have the luxury of time to keep pretending. Neither, honestly, do the communities we work with.
One of the things Morrie talks about most is relationships. He says, and I’m paraphrasing from memory, that if you don’t have someone to share your life with, you don’t really have a life worth the name. He wasn’t talking about romance. He was talking about the whole web – friends, teachers, neighbours, the people who show up. And this made me think of something I see constantly in the field that outsiders often underestimate: the sheer power of community relationships.
Last year, we were trying to revive a water conservation effort in a cluster of villages that had essentially lost trust in any external intervention. Every department had come, made promises, and left. And the reason we were eventually able to get even a single panchayat on board wasn’t because of our presentations or our data. It was because of one woman, a local leader, who had known our field coordinator for six years. She vouched for us. That one relationship opened the door. Morrie would have smiled at that. He understood that the structures we think hold the world together – institutions, systems, hierarchies – are actually held together by something far more fragile and far more powerful: trust between people.
We often talk about “community mobilisation” like it’s a technique. A set of steps. But really, it’s just Morrie’s lesson dressed in field language. You build relationships. You show up, consistently, not just when you need something. And eventually, the community knows you’re not just passing through.
There’s a chapter where Morrie talks about detachment – not the cold kind, not the kind where you stop caring, but a specific kind of detachment where you let yourself feel something fully and then let it go. He gives this almost strange example: when he feels sad, he allows himself to be completely sad. He doesn’t push it away. He just feels it, and then, because he’s felt it completely, it doesn’t swallow him whole.
I thought about that for a long time. Because in the field, there are days – and if you’ve worked in grassroots development long enough, you know exactly the days I’m talking about – when you meet a family that has slipped through every single safety net. They’re eligible. On paper, they should have received support years ago. But they haven’t, and now it’s too late for one thing, and the next thing hasn’t arrived, and you’re sitting across from them not knowing what to say. Those days, if you don’t feel it, you’ve stopped being human. But if you carry every single one of those moments home with you every night, you will burn out before the year is over. Morrie’s lesson – feel it, then let it pass – is not philosophy. It’s survival.
I’ve had to learn this the hard way. The best field workers I’ve known are not the ones who have made themselves numb. They’re the ones who have somehow found a way to grieve fully and then show up the next morning.
Somewhere in the middle of the book, Morrie says something that I’ve now written on a sticky note on my wall. He says: “The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.” That sounds like the kind of sentence people put on greeting cards and then forget. But he meant it differently. He was talking about ego. About the way we build walls – professional walls, personal walls – because we’re afraid that if we let people in, we’ll seem weak, or vulnerable, or unprepared. And he was saying: those walls are killing you.
I’ve watched this play out in field coordination meetings more times than I can count. Two organisations, both doing good work, both genuinely caring about the same community – and they won’t share data with each other because they’re protecting their turf. Or a government official who actually wants to help but won’t admit he doesn’t know something because he’s worried about how it will look. Or even me, sometimes, in the early days, pretending to have answers I didn’t have because I wanted to seem competent. Morrie would have called it out gently, in that way of his, and asked: who exactly are you protecting? And at what cost?
The projects that I have seen work – really work, not just on paper – are almost always the ones where someone, at some point, dropped the ego. Where someone said, “I don’t know, but let’s figure it out together.” That kind of honesty is rare and it is magnetic. Communities sense it immediately.
Near the end of the book, Morrie talks about death. Not in a dark way – in a way that’s almost luminous. He says he’s made peace with it, and that making peace with it has made him more present for everything else. He’s not waiting for it to be over. He’s here, fully, until he isn’t.
This is the one that stayed with me the longest, because fieldwork has its own version of endings that we don’t talk about enough. Projects end. Funding cycles close. You build something over three years with a community – real trust, real systems, real change – and then the grant ends, the team disperses, and you move on to the next geography. The community is left to continue what was started, and you hope it holds. There is a particular kind of grief in that, a particular kind of guilt, that people in development work carry quietly.
But the Morrie’s lesson applies here too. You can’t let the fear of the ending make you hold back during the project. The answer is not to not get attached. The answer is to be fully present for the time you have, to build things that can stand without you, and then – when the time comes – to let go with the same honesty with which you arrived. The best exit from a field project looks a little like Morrie’s approach to his own death: complete, intentional, and without unfinished emotional business.
By the time I finished the book that January night, it was past two in the morning. I sat with it for a while before I went to sleep. Outside, the village was silent in the way villages are silent at night – completely, in all directions. And I thought: Morrie spent his Tuesdays with Mitch talking about how to be human. I spend my days in the field trying to serve communities that have been stripped of the basic conditions for that same humanity. And somehow, those two things feel deeply connected.
He never visited a village. He never sat in a community meeting or wrote a field report or navigated the bureaucracy of a government scheme. But Morrie understood people. And in the end, that’s what every piece of fieldwork is built on – not systems, not strategies, not even funding – but the willingness to actually see the person in front of you.
That, more than anything else, is what Tuesdays with Morrie reminded me of.
And some lessons, it turns out, don’t need a Tuesday. They just need the right night, and a book left on a table.
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