Book Review: The Four Things That Matter Most -A Book about Living



Book Review: The Four Things That Matter Most -A Book about Living

Introduction

The book is written by a physician Ira Byock, inspired by the four phrases which have the power to impact life positively (Byock, 2004). The book mainly focuses on the relationships and the end of life. Ira Byock is an expert of palliative care and through this book he wants to share his ideas on how the simple expressions of love and forgiveness can make or lives and world better. According to the author, the four phrases, "Please forgive me," "I forgive you," "Thank you," and "I love you" contains the most powerful words which we use every day. Dr Byock has shared the real life stories of patients in his book, in order to highlight the importance of these four phrases, and to provide the readers with the distilled wisdom on how they can use these phrases in their day to day conversations.

Summary

The book is a collection of stories which share the use of four magical phrases "Please forgive me," "I forgive you," "Thank you," and "I love you" (Growth house.org, 2013). Mostly, people avoid using these phrases, because they assume that others already know when they want to seek for forgiveness, express gratitude and love. However, sometimes these assumptions do not work and result in increasing distance between the people, or creating misunderstandings between the relationships. Thus, the author has tried to narrate stories in order to depict the importance of actually saying these four phrases. The author wants to explain that how we can make our life and relationships simpler and comfortable by avoiding the painful silence.

The author described the fact that most of the time we assume that the people whom we know already know that we love them; however this may not always be the case. Therefore, there always remains a need of making confessions about the love we have for others. We actually remain under burden of these assumptions, which can very easily be released by being obvious to the people. The Physician himself said that he has written the collection of stories because he was inspired by the people who solved the critical issues through the effective use of these four words. According to Byock, these were the issues for which he had through that they were impossible to be solved; it was the stories of people which made the physician believe that emotional healing is possible at any stage of issues (Growth house.org, 2013).

Seeking of forgiveness, Expression of gratitude and love has its importance in all the relationships through which we go in our lives. For example, the expression of forgiveness helps a lot in mending the destructive patterns between a child and his parents (Oberg, 2011). Similarly, the expression of love for our elders, or soul mates may entirely change the nature of relationship and may bring colors in our ...