【推荐1】You have heard the words “that which does not kill you makes you stronger”. I have found it true. But I also believe in the philosophy that we are not defined (定义) by what happens to us, but by what we do when things happen to us.

Some friends think we have had far more than our share of bad things occur, but I don’t think bad things are shared. They are events that occur as the result of many aspects, sometimes far past our control or even knowledge of them. I am also a firm believer in the laws of unintended consequences — one event causes things that are quite unexpected, sometimes positive, sometimes not.

So as I considered the question of “What motivates me?” and sought an answer, it struck me that I simply refuse to be defeated. I won’t let life or events tear me down to the point at which I am no longer me, or simply stop being.

In 2008, I battled three types of cancer, had four cancer operations, the firm I worked for closed without notice, my wife was in a horrible car accident, got laid off from her company, the economy devastated our life savings, … and that was for starters.

We also lost two family members and my closest friend. He was the last person I would expect to pass away out of our friends. But a disease took hold of him 9 years earlier. His memorial service was filled with love, and many of us told about his joy of life, humor, his achievements, and the challenges he had overcome in his life — which were many and painful. He would not be defeated in his life either.

Today, my wife and I are hand-in-hand, continuing trying to live our lives with dignity, although living it differently from the end of 2007.

【推荐2】He must have had that nice window seat all the way from London. An Indian, he looked under 40, medium height, slim and wore a suit. I got an aisle seat next to him. I looked at him and tried to smile as I sat down. But there was a blank, distant look that made me stop mid-smile. One of those, I thought.

Each time I take a flight, I try to chat with a fellow passenger. Most people are responsive when they’re alone at 40,000 feet. But the man wearing the suit on my left was a puzzle. One of those non-resident Indians, I thought. What do you lose if you just smiled at a fellow human being? Most of the time, he stared fixedly at the seat in front of him. Why are some people so full of themselves?

When the stewardess brought lunch, the unfriendly man had his eyes shut. She gave me a should-I-wake-him-up look. I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t get his lunch. Serves him right. He soon woke up and saw me eat. But he didn’t ask for his meal. He could just have pressed a button. That’s his problem.

We still have almost two hours of flying left. I read a magazine. I try to play a video game. I listen to music. He does nothing. At times our eyes meet, but he isn’t all there. He’s like no other passenger I’ve ever sat next to. By the time our jet lands in Mumbai, I find his presence almost uncomfortable. As we taxi down the runway, I hear the man speak for the first time—on his mobile phone. He seems to be discussing his connecting flight. About somebody receiving him… Just before the aircraft comes to a halt, he’s the first to stand up. “Excuse me,” he says to me. “May I leave? I can’t miss my connecting flight.”

Hmm…! I get up to make way for him when he goes on mechanically, “My wife and child died in a road accident in Delhi.” I’m shocked by his words. Suddenly, everything falls in place.

Despite his terrible loss and the sufferings he has been enduring, he was calm, controlled throughout. And, maybe, in the midst of his soul-crushing sorrow, he didn’t want to burden a stranger with his pain.

【推荐3】A couple had a son eleven years after they married. They were a loving couple and the boy was the apple of their eye. When the boy was around four years old, one day the father was very tired after work so he asked his wife to pick up their son. The mother, who was very busy in the kitchen, totally forgot about it.

Later the boy lost his way on the street. When the son was found missing, the mother hurried to look for him, but she didn’t find him. The mother felt very sad and didn’t know how to face her husband.

When the father went to the police station after hearing that the son was missing, he looked at his wife and said just four words. What do you think the four words were? The husband just said "I love you, darling."

The son was missing. If he had picked him up earlier, this would not have happened. There is no point in blaming (责备) anyone. His wife had also lost her only child. What his wife needed at that moment was comfort and understanding from her husband. That is what the husband gave his wife. Several weeks later, with the help of the police, the couple finally found their lost son. The family’s relationship became stronger over that time.

Sometimes we spend lots of time asking who is to blame. We miss many chances to give each other support and let each other feel the warmth of human relationships. Get rid of all your unwillingness to forgive, selfishness, and fears and you will find the world is much more wonderful.

【推荐1】At just 11 years old, Vince Weishaus runs his own hair salon(发廊) in his parents' basement in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, doing different hairstyles for free.

For Vince, his love of hair started at a very young age. "He has an older sister who had dolls and he would just, at 2 or 3, be playing with the dolls' hair,” recalled Emily Weishaus, Vince's mother.

Not long afterward, he also fell in love with braiding(编辫子). "He watched me do a braid, and then he undid the braid and redid it without me ever showing him how to do it,” his mother said. He found his true passion as a hairstylist when he started cutting his grandmother's hair before he was 5. “At the very beginning, I feel like that's what gave him the confidence to be who he is,” she added.

Vince's hairstyling dream became a reality when his parents presented him with a special surprise on his ninth birthday: his very own salon in their basement. His neighbor had a salon in her home, but she decided to pass on her supplies to Vince when she moved.

Family members and friends have stopped by for appointments—all free of charge—at Vincent Charles Salon. The kid's services range from coloring, to braiding the for proms (舞会), family parties, talent shows and more. He has dyed his own hair different colors, from rose gold to purple. He even colors his friends' hair tips before they head off to camp.

Vince loves learning different practices and tricks of the trade from other hair mentors, such as his own stylist, Chelsea, who teaches him many styling skills.

The sky is the limit for Vince—his eventual goal is to become a world-famous hair colorist one day. His advice to anyone who wants to pursue their own dreams: “Do what they love and be themselves.”

【推荐2】The Wuhan Institute of Shipbuilding Technology was used as a quarantine site (隔离区) from Feb 8 to March 28. Cheng Shining, a junior of Central China Normal University in Wuhan, was responsible for collecting and distributing supplies for quarantined people and medical staff. As the youngest volunteer at this site, he also chose to live there so that he could show up whenever he was needed.

One day Cheng and two other volunteers took more than 3 hours to move all 1,462 boxes of mineral water to storage with 50 firemen's help. Cheng says. "A single person's strength is limited, but we know the whole country is helping us."

Cheng was a volunteer for the Military World Games held in Wuhan last October. It was the first time he saw his hometown under the world's spotlight. "I've experienced the highlight of Wuhan, and now when my hometown touched a low point, I want to get through the difficulty together with the city," Cheng says.

Like Cheng, 28-year-old Wuhan local Zhu Aobing also volunteered to help his home city. He signed up right away to be a volunteer for the vaccine. A total of 108 Wuhan locals became the first group of COVID-19 vaccine volunteers in March. They are healthy adults aged from 18 to 60 selected from thousands of people who applied.

"Since the lockdown, I've always been thinking what I can do for my hometown during the epidemic," he says. Zhu is a freshman of Hubei University of Technology in Wuhan. He joined the army when he was 18 years old and served for five years. However, Zhu didn't want to miss the chance to study further, so he decided to go to college last year.

"No matter how long I have finished my military service, I always have the responsibility to go to the front line when the country needs me, and when facing this pandemic(疫情)，being a vaccine volunteer is what I should do," he says.

【推荐3】When I was only 3 years old, my mother taught me to memorize and recite poems. She was my first teacher of the arts, and my father was the first to appreciate my performance. Even at that young age, I had a simple understanding of how art and culture affect us as human beings and how we can connect to each other through the arts, which shapes my life to this day.

When I was growing up, my parents supported my interest in taking acting classes and doing community theater. Their faith in me and the professional(专业的) training I was getting from my theater teachers gave me a sense of purpose and a sense of self-confidence. I learned what artistic achievement actually was and what hard work the business was. While many people see the rosy picture to our business, I was really learning what it would require for me to become a professional.

I became an actress, but arts education isn’t just about preparing our young people for a job in the arts. I recently talked to some of the kids attending theater education. Some of them want to work in theater, and some don’t. They are learning not only theater skills, but also about the world around them. They learn about discipline(纪律) and hard work and what’s required and what they have to do to bring themselves to the work. They learn how they can be of service in the world through the arts. They learn how to work with a team. By studying the arts, these students are open to worlds and lives that they might not have any other way of knowing about or any other way to connect with in their lives the way they are right now.

These young people are our future. We are passing the torch to them. And I think that’s one of the most important reasons why we need to foster(培养) the arts.

【推荐1】The young man arrived on the Massachusetts beach early carrying a radio, a shovel (铁锹), and a strange set of tools: a brick layer’s trowel, a palette knife, spatulas, spoons, and a spray bottle.

He walked down near the water — the tide (潮水) was out — and switched on the radio to listen to soft rock. Then he shoveled wet sand into a pile nearly four feet high and as many feet across. Then he created a square shape.

After that, he set to work with palette knife, spatulas, and spoons. He shaped a splendid tower, topped walls, fashioned beautiful bay windows, and carved (雕刻) out a big front gate.

The man knew his sand. He smoothly finished some surfaces and carved artistic designs on others. As the shapes began to dry, he gently kept them slightly wet with water from the spray bottle, in case they might break in the wind.

All this took hours. People gathered. At last he stood back, obviously satisfied with a castle worthy of the Austrian countryside or Disneyland.

Then he gathered his tools and radio and moved them up to drier sand. He had known for a while what many in the crowd still ignored: the tide was coming in. Not only had he practiced his art with confidence and style, he also had done so against a powerful, irresistible (不可抵抗的) deadline.

As the crowd looked on, water came at the base of the castle. In minutes it was surrounded. Then the rising flood began to eat into the base, walls fell, the tower fell, and finally the gate fell. More minutes passed, and small waves erased bay windows — soon no more than a small part was left.

Many in the crowd looked terribly sad; some voiced fear and discouragement. But the man remained calm. He had, after all, had a wonderful day, making beauty out of nothing, and watching it return to nothing as time and tide moved on.

【推荐3】When I was in university, I spent a semester studying abroad at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. In my brief time there, I came to love Scotland for its local culture, food and scenery.

You might think, “Scotland isn’t so different from the US; they still speak English there!” But when I stepped off the plane, I was greeted by a gruff-voiced (声音粗哑的) lady at customs. “You’ll be coming from America, then?” she asked me, and I nodded. “But all of our lads (小伙子) are leaving Glasgow for the States!” Her thick Scottish English and sense of humor were obvious right away. I was not in the US anymore, where customs agents never joke around.

As I settled in at the university, I could feel myself getting used to hearing and even speaking the Scottish English of my customs agent. In classroom discussions, people would say “em” when they couldn’t think of what to say instead of “um”. After the first few weeks, I stopped chuckling about this. Strathclyde students stayed up late into the night, running around campus and shouting, “Here weh, here weh, here weh (curse word]) go! Lat’s go, lat’s go, lat’s go (curse word) Glasgow!” Pretty soon, I was no longer saying “thanks” at the supermarket — instead, I said “cheers”.

My Scottish friends drank whiskey and ate haggis (羊杂碎布丁), a hearty dish made from sheep’s heart, liver and lungs. I drank plenty of whiskey but I’m ashamed to admit that I wasn’t brave enough to try haggis. Scottish bakeries usually sell bridies (肉馅饼), pies filled with salt and pepper, sliced onions, steak, butter and fat. Add a cup of tea – though I usually Americanized it by choosing coffee instead — and a bridie makes for a delicious breakfast.

Every time I took a train anywhere in Scotland, I’d gaze out at the rolling hills and wonder if grass was greener anywhere else in the world. Then I’d reflect that there’s a reason this country was the birthplace of golf.

【推荐1】Everyone has heard the phrase, “giving up is not an option”. Many disregard it and do not believe in it. But this small yet effective phrase gives a strong message. There will always be something that interrupts or causes inconvenience in the journey to achieve the dreams. But that should not drive one away from the path that they are on. Fitting the context perfectly is the story of Ian William.

Popularly known as the “Social Golfer”, Ian William is an accountant, lecturer, author, and a former golf player. He dreamed of playing golf at childhood. He would often observe players playing from a distance. He worked hard and changed his financial(财政的) difficulties. Then he began practicing various golf matches. Due to his devotion and love for the sport, he picked up the techniques quickly and soon began playing as a professional. He also dreamed of participating in the Senior Golf Tour in the coming year.

However, in 1996, Ian was diagnosed with a tumor (肿瘤) in the left part of his brain, which affected his hearing from the right side and damaged his balance nerve. He experienced two surgeries in 1997 with a smile and a hope to be cured. Although the surgeries were successful, Ian caught meningitis (脑膜炎) while recovering from it. Apart from being hopeful and optimistic, there was no other way Ian could cope with the situation.

Just as things had begun to normalize, in 2006, Ian’s body was affected by a major stroke. This stroke numbed (使麻木) the left side of his body. His life-long dream of participating a golf tournament could not be realized anymore.

Ian took his time to recover and came back even stronger. He wanted to encourage millions with his journey and decided to share his experiences through a book. Ian has now published his 3rd book Still Crazy After All These Years, in 2020.

【推荐2】If it were up to me, I’d write this piece next week or even later. Let the dust settle a bit. But I have my father’s insistent voice in my head: the story is now, so you write it now. No one wants to read last week’s news.

My father Michael was a journalist. He started at age 16 on his local paper, the Luton News, and after nine years there, he went on to a six-decade career that saw him write more than 40 biographies of Hollywood stars and spend a quarter-century presenting a weekly radio show.

From him I learned about deadlines and accuracy, and absorbed his rule about professional clothing, one he had been taught by his first boss. Even when he was working at home, my father would follow that rule: shirt and tie, every day.

There were other less obvious lessons. The first is about being manly. Driven and competitive, he wasn’t present for the birth of any of his three children, but he was the very model of being loving and faithful. My father never took me to the football or taught me to change a tyre. In a pub, he might manage some drinks, but his main focus would usually be the food menu. He was a model of a different kind of maleness.

But perhaps the biggest lesson I learned from him was about resilience (恢复). He got deep blows, losing both his wife and firstborn child, my sister Fiona, within two years of each other. And yet, somehow, he got back up again. He taught himself to cook and continued to dress neatly, picking out a bright jacket that ensured he stood out in a room. He would meet editors and write stories with the same hunger he had 65 years earlier. Younger colleagues keep using the same word about him: appealing.

I hope I learned his resilience, the way I learned about being a journalist. People keep telling me that my father was proud of me; and the truth is I was proud of him. Raised in a hard-up corner of wartime England, he went off to see the world—and he never stopped looking forward and upward, staring at the stars.

【推荐3】Homeowners Tom Carroll and Hermine Ricketts held a ceremonial planting of vegetables in their garden on the day when a Florida law went into effect that nullifies(废除，取消) local bans on vegetable gardens at residential properties. It was one of those rules that had forced the couple to uproot a garden that Ricketts had tended for 17 years.

Ricketts had her vegetable garden in front of her home because her house faces south and her backyard is mostly in the shade. Ricketts says she gardens for the food and for the peace it brings her.

But then a rule was tightened to forbid vegetables in the front yard on the grounds that they were unsightly. A daily $50 fine went into effect, so Ricketts pulled up her garden.

And she lawyered up. She reached out to Institute for Justice, a national advocacy group that fights for property rights, among other issues.

It took six years, but they won. The Florida Legislature passed a bill protecting vegetable gardens, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it into law. “After nearly six years of fighting ... I will once again be able to legally plant vegetables in my front yard, ” Ricketts said in a statement. “I’m grateful to the Legislature and the governor for standing up to protect my freedom to grow healthy food on my own property.”

She complained that the fight even had to happen. “We had a beautiful, nutritious garden for many years before the Village went out of its way to ban it and then threatened us with ruinous fines, ” she said.

“Gardening is wonderful, ” Ricketts told the Miami Herald on Monday. “I feel victory. ... I have no words.”