5 greatest lessons from the Great Gatsby

Hello, my dear readers! Are you enjoying October, or would you rather make it end right now? I must admit I’m both loving and hating it at the same time, so I couldn’t give you my answer. As a book lover, I read a lot, and I adore lots of books. Each of them leaves its trace, even the slightest one, in my soul, so it’s hard to pick favorites. However, there’s one extraordinary work, which holds a special place in my heart – “The Great Gatsby” by Scott Francis Fitzgerald.  My absolute number 1.

I have learnt so much from this book, and I believe that it built me in more ways I could ever imagine. Here are 5 greatest lessons I learnt from “The Great Gatsby”!

1. Don’t hold onto the past.

I don’t want to spoil the book for those, who have never read it, but I have to say that page by page we are able to follow the story of somebody, who couldn’t let the past go, and consequences of this behaviour are truly deadly. Spoiler alert now – don’t be like Gatsby, who was foolish enough to think he could repeat the past. It happened and it will never happen again no matter how hard you try. It could be similar, but never the same again. I remind myself about it each time I want to revive something what’s already dead. Production of zombies is good for Apocalypse, but I wouldn’t like my life to be an apocalyptic movie. I bet neither would you.  Nevertheless, sometimes we do it anyway, because as Fitzgerald wrote:

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

 

           2. Tell no to idolising people

I’m guilty of this one too often. I get fascinated with people quickly, and I tend to create the idea of a person, rather than see somebody just the way he is. It doesn’t take me long to see through them, once my short fascinations end, but it’s still dangerous. Why? People are only people, flesh and bone. I’m not the idea of a person, but the person, and so are you and anybody else. No matter how great somebody is, they will never be as perfect as you pictured them. They will hurt you, and you will probably hurt them too because perfection doesn’t exist.

There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams — not through her own fault, but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.

          3. Refrain from judgement

That’s a hard thing to do. We judge each other all the time because it’s easy and everybody does it. It’s way harder to try to understand, right? It requires some effort to refrain from judgement. A good tip to always remember: “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone […] just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” Simply said, yet how true it is! We look at everything from our 5th floor, forgetting it could look different from the 10th floor.

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope.

 

         4. It takes two to make an accident

When something goes wrong people look for somebody to blame. Usually, one person becomes a so-called scapegoat, so everyone could be happy. The thing is that in life, it’s mostly not that simple – it takes two to make an accident. Don’t put the blame on each other, until it’s a pointless war. Very often both sides have their fair share in whatever went wrong.

It takes two to make an accident.

 

         5. Appreciate people today, not only tomorrow

How often do you tell your friends and family how much they mean to you? How often do you tell them “thanks for being here”? How often are you grateful for them? We rarely practice gratitude and we should. Nothing’s ours, not even the present day.

Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.

 

That’s it. I highly recommend you to read “The great Gatsby” if you haven’t done it yet. It’s truly a brilliant work, and  suitable for the busiest of us with its 122 pages to read. I can assure you it won’t be a wasted time. Thanks for sticking with me – I hope that you liked what you found here!

What are your favorite books? Have you ever read “The Great Gatsby”? Let me know in comments!

Have a lovely day,

Jessie