Moving Against the Current: Discovering Values through Action

Author: Anna Miyabe

Third-year student at Sophia University 

Publication permission was granted in February 2026

Introduction

“I often tell my students to do just three things: read many books, travel, and eat various kinds of food.  What they all have in common is this: do things that move your heart.  If you do not keep your heart moving while it still can be moved, it will eventually stop responding.”  This sentence stayed with me long after I heard it.  Until then, I had unconsciously assumed that sensitivity and emotional responsiveness naturally belonged to youth, and that aging meant gradually losing the ability to feel deeply.  The idea that the heart must be actively moved or risk becoming unresponsive challenged this assumption. 

Given this assignment, a particular couple immediately came to mind.  They were once my neighbors in my hometown of Takarazuka City, Hyogo. They are both university professors and are now raising an eight-year-old daughter.  Over the years, they have been my teachers of life.  They broadened my interest in foreign cultures and language learning, and I have long admired the way they live.  During a visit over winter break, I spoke with them about life and aging.  Their reflections, read alongside Tuesdays with Morrie, suggest that aging is not a process of emotional decline but one of intentional movement, learning how to resist cultural pressures, cultivate independence, and continue choosing what moves the heart.  This essay explores how keeping the heart in motion becomes not only a personal practice but a form of quiet resistance against a culture that encourages emotional stagnation. 

The Conversation: Analysis & Interpretation

As both of them are university professors, their conversation was endlessly varied and interesting.  When I asked what they had lost through aging, they paused before answering that the only thing they could name, almost reluctantly, was physical strength.  The hesitation itself was revealing.  Loss did not seem to be the defining framework through which they understood aging. In contrast, when I asked what they had gained, they answered without hesitation that there were many: knowledge, experience, friendships, their daughter, and economic stability.  For them, aging was not a process of subtraction but one of reorganization and accumulation. 

This perspective became even clearer when I asked whether growing older was enjoyable. Both answered yes, and one of them emphasized that he did not want to return to his younger years.  This response closely echoes Morrie’s belief that once a person finds meaning, they no longer wish to go backward but instead “want to go forward” and “see more, do more” (Albom 118).  Like Morrie, they rejected the cultural assumption that youth represents the peak of life. 

At the same time, both interviewees resisted presenting themselves as role models. One of them remarked that there was nothing they could confidently “teach” younger people, insisting that they had merely spent their lives enjoying what they loved and working hard at it.  What was notable was their shared insistence that choosing a “fun” (楽しい) path does not mean choosing an easy (楽な) one. As one explained, living according to one’s own standards requires far more effort than following an existing system.  While joining a pre-established structure allows one to “simply go along,” creating a life based on personal values demands building one’s own framework from scratch, a process they described as requiring “three times the effort” and constant self-direction.  Importantly, enjoyment did not eliminate hardship in this account; rather, when something is truly enjoyable, even its hardships become part of the enjoyment, they said. 

Their reflections complicate the common opposition between freedom and stability.  Although they emphasized the importance of choosing one’s own path, they also acknowledged the relief that came from entering an institutional system, such as obtaining part-time and later full-time university positions.  The security of formal employment brought relief, suggesting that independence and structure are not mutually opposite but exist in tension.  What mattered most to them was not rejecting systems altogether but choosing environments and people that felt genuinely enjoyable and sustaining. 

At the end of the discussion, they emphasized the importance of “moving.”  Especially through reading, traveling, and eating.  These were meaningful insofar as they all actively engaged the heart.  They warned that if the heart is not moved while it still can be, it gradually becomes unresponsive.  This is a concern they saw as particularly urgent for young people surrounded by passive forms of consumption.

Textual Analysis

In Tuesdays with Morrie, he repeatedly frames aging and fulfillment as a resistance to the dominant values of modern culture.  Early in the book, Morrie states that “the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves” (Albom 35) and urges people to be strong enough to say, “if the culture doesn’t work, don’t buy it” (Albom 35).  The language of consumption, “buy it,” casts culture as something passively absorbed rather than actively chosen.  However, this framing leaves open an important question: what replaces culture once it is rejected? 

This question becomes more pronounced when Morrie later insists, “Forget what the culture says” (Albom 116).  The imperative tone suggests urgency, yet it also simplifies the process of resistance.  Forgetting alone does not necessarily generate meaning. Read through the lens of my interviewees’ reflections, Morrie’s advice appears incomplete.  While Morrie emphasizes detachment from cultural pressures, the couple stressed that disengagement must be accompanied by intentional action.  For them, meaning does not emerge from rejection alone, but from deliberate movement such as reading, traveling, and encountering the world in ways that actively engage the heart. 

Morrie’s discussion of enjoyment further reveals this gap between attitude and practice.  When he claims, “For me, it’s just remembering how to enjoy it” (Albom 116), enjoyment appears as a recovery of an inner state, something remembered rather than newly produced.  Similarly, he argues that once people find meaning, they naturally want to “go forward” and “see more, do more” (Albom 118).  Yet Morrie rarely specifies how this forward movement occurs. In contrast, my interviewees insisted that enjoyment must be continually renewed through action.  Without conscious effort to move physically, intellectually, and emotionally, the capacity for enjoyment itself risks becoming unresponsive. 

This tension becomes most visible in Morrie’s statement that “the big things—how we think, what we value—those you must choose yourself” (Albom 155). Choice is central to Morrie’s philosophy, but it remains largely abstract.  The interview reframes choice as embodied practice: choosing means deciding where to go, what to read, whom to meet, and how to live on a daily level. Through this lens, Morrie’s philosophy can be reread not simply as a critique of culture, but as an unfinished call for “mobility.”  The interview thus supplements Morrie’s thought by translating resistance into lived action, suggesting that keeping the heart moving is not only emotional but decisively practical.

Research Integration

The Morrie’s values and the interviewees’ emphasis on “moving” the heart through experience can be productively illuminated through psychological, gerontological, and philosophical research. 

First, Daniel Goleman’s theory of emotional intelligence supports the interviewees’ insistence that emotional responsiveness must be actively maintained.  While individuals differ in their emotional abilities, Goleman emphasizes that emotional skills are not fixed traits but “a body of habit and response that, with the right effort, can be improved on” (Goleman 38).  This suggests that the risk of emotional stagnation is not a natural consequence of aging, but of disuse, which closely aligns with the interviewees’ warning that the heart stops responding if it is not continually moved. 

Socioemotional selectivity theory (SST) further deepens this perspective by explaining why such active emotional engagement becomes increasingly significant over time. According to Laura Carstensen, perceived time horizons shape motivational priorities: when the future is experienced as open-ended, people tend to prioritize knowledge acquisition and exploration, even when these pursuits are emotionally demanding (Carstensen 1190). As time horizons become more limited, however, individuals increasingly prioritize emotionally meaningful goals, such as deep relationships, a sense of purpose, and immediate satisfaction (Carstensen 1190). From this perspective, the interviewees’ emphasis on “moving” through reading, traveling, eating, and encountering people is not merely advice for staying mentally active, but a practice that helps preserve a sense of emotional meaning over time. Importantly, their position differs from Morrie’s in terms of temporal context.  While Morrie speaks from the standpoint of advanced age, with a sharply limited time horizon, the interviewees are still in their forties and fifties, a stage in which future time remains open but increasingly finite.

Lastly, American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952)’s philosophy of education offers a crucial framework for understanding why movement matters.  Dewey famously argues that “all genuine education comes about through experience” (Dewey 8), emphasizing that learning is not the passive reception of information but the active reconstruction of experience. He further describes education as the “intelligently directed development of the possibilities inherent in ordinary experience” (Dewey 40). This clarifies the interviewees’ critique of contemporary culture, in which information is endlessly available without requiring physical or emotional engagement.  Even ordinary experiences like reading a book, visiting a place, or sharing a meal can become meaningful if it actively moves the heart and reorganize one’s understanding of the world. 

Together, these theories reveal that emotional vitality is not a natural byproduct of aging, nor is it guaranteed by good intentions alone.  It emerges through sustained effort, selective commitment, and embodied experience.

My Own Reflection 

Before this conversation, I tended to agree with Morrie’s ideas almost instinctively. His critique of culture and his emphasis on choosing one’s own values felt persuasive, and I rarely questioned their practicality.  However, speaking with my mentors complicated this agreement. They repeatedly acknowledged that “laziness wins over everything,” yet insisted that to move still matters; intelligence does not take root without movement. They also admitted that physical strength was inevitably lost with age. This awareness gave me urgency to their advice: one must move while one still can—meet people, travel, read, and expose oneself to different experiences—because the capacity to do so is not permanent. 

This perspective forced me to reconsider my own habits. I realized how easily I am influenced by idealized images on social media, mistaking visibility and popularity for value. In contrast, the interviewees stressed the importance of cultural independence: seeing the world through one’s own standards rather than borrowed ones.  Reflecting on this, I recognized that my long-standing attachment to the Takarazuka Revue is not something I adopted because it was fashionable, but because it genuinely moves me. This realization helped me understand cultural independence not as rejecting culture altogether, but as choosing what resonates on a personal level. 

Although persuasive, Morrie’s arguments are largely concerned with mindset. The interview clarified for me that values are not formed through thought alone, but through sometimes tiring acts of movement.  Rather than resolving my questions, this realization left me with a more demanding challenge: to continue moving intentionally, even when “not moving” feels easier.

Conclusion

Through reading Tuesdays with Morrie, speaking with my interviewees, and engaging with this academic research, I came to understand aging not as a gradual dulling of the heart, but as a practice of continually engaging and moving the heart.  Resisting social values is not accomplished by withdrawal alone.  It requires movement in physical, emotional, and intellectual ways, through which one’s own values are continually discovered and revised.  

Morrie’s philosophy taught me the importance of choosing meaning, but the conversation revealed how demanding such a choice can be in practice, especially in a culture that rewards passivity and comparison.  What remains unresolved is how movement can remain intentional, rather than becoming another form of cultural performance.  Writing this essay has shifted my understanding from seeking answers to cultivating attentiveness: to what moves my heart now, and to the responsibility of continuing to move while I still can.

Works Cited: 

Albom, Mitch. Tuesdays with Morrie. Crown, 1997.

Carstensen, Laura L. “Socioemotional selectivity theory: The role of perceived endings in human motivation.” The Gerontologist, vol. 61, no. 8, 27 Oct. 2021, pp. 1188–1196. 

Dewey, John. “Experience and Education .” School of Educators, www.schoolofeducators.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/EXPERIENCE-EDUCATION-JOHN-DEWEY.pdf. Accessed 25 Jan. 2026. 

Goleman, Daniel. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020.