【推荐3】At the beginning of every school year, I feared coming home with the heavy homework of the first day after a summer of fun. And I feared getting another teacher who had a long list of rules and a stare that could kill a cat.

But there was always one part of beginning a new school year that I enjoyed. I always liked going to the store to arm myself with new school supplies—even if I didn’t need them.

Sure, my pencils, erasers and notebooks from the previous school year may have had some life left in them. But this didn’t matter. Every year, Dad would pile us into the car, take us to Wal-Mart and let us buy the newest and coolest pencils, rainbow-coloured erasers and spiral notebooks.

Besides school supplies, many parents also take their kids on annual shopping spree for new clothes and book bags just in time for school. During the whole process, children are in high spirits, buying a lot of stuff and are back home exhausted.

Every year, most of my classmates and I show up to school on the first day with something smelling like a new car. We’d put our new stationery on top of the desks, just to make sure others see them.

Leftover supplies from past years were always stuffed into the living room desk. Used clothes that had lost their appeal were sent to second-hand shops, where they would be sold for 50 cents a piece.

However, all of the new stuff could only make us excited about going to school for one week, after which the usual boredom and fear come back.

【推荐1】Lions are the top tourist attraction to Kenya, especially in the Nairobi National Park. But they are also considered critically endangered as residents responded their attacking local live-stock by killing. Paula Kahumbu, executive director of Wildlife Direct, a wildlife protection organization in Africa, has been studying the conflict between humans and lions. And her work led her to Richard Turere, a 13-year-old inventor.

“From ages 6 to 9, I started looking after my father’s cows,” Richard says. “I’d take them out in the morning and bring them back in the evening. We put them in a small cow shed (牛棚) at night,” and that’s when the trouble would start. Lions would jump in the shed and kill the cows, which are enclosed and an easy target.

One night he was walking around with a flashlight and discovered the lions were scared of a moving light. An idea was born. Three weeks later, Richard invented a system of lights that flash around the cow shed, imitating a human walking around with a flashlight. Made from broken flashlight parts and an indicator box from a motorcycle, the system employed a solar panel to charge a battery that supplies power to the lights at night. Richard calls the system Lion Lights.

His simple solution was so successful that his neighbors heard about it and wanted Lion Lights, too. He installed the lights for them and for six other homes in his community. From there, the lights spread and are now being used in many countries including Kenya, Zambia and Tanzania.

“There have been a lot of efforts to protect the lions,” Kahumbu says. “Everyone is looking for a solution. One idea was land leases, another was lion-proof fences. It’s amazing that Richard had already come up with something that worked.”

【推荐1】I was searching for a job when an ad caught my attention. The job was within walking distance of my home.

Anyone out of work for a long time knows how bad losing a job can be. One moment, I was valuable to the company; the next moment I was out. I began to question my abilities and myself.

But now, for this perfect job, I wrote the perfect application. As I pushed Send, I closed my eyes and told myself with confidence, “I’ve got this job.” I started thinking about the job as if it were already mine. It was a happy feeling.

A couple of days later, I received an e-mail for an interview. I selected what I would wear and began to imagine how the interview would go, feeling my confidence build.

It was a gorgeous summer day, and its warmth gave me energy. I was led into a conference room where the managers greeted me.

What I had seen of the office interested me, and I could already picture myself sitting at my desk. A sense of belonging filled me. When the interview was finished, I realized the time had passed quickly.

By the end of the week, the desired call arrived, and my dream became a reality. By the time I was ready to leave home, I was relaxed and eager to begin my day. As I walked, a familiar feeling rose inside me. I’d taken this walk to work many times in my mind, but now it was real!

【推荐2】“Are you all right?” the student asked as she passed me in the hallway. I was in the final stretch of last work before writing my essay. The student, who was 4 years behind me in the same Ph.D. program, went on to say, “I see people from your group working so much, putting in extra hours, even at night.” It set me thinking a lot.

As a first-year Ph.D. student, I was lucky to have kind and understanding advisers. But I felt overwhelming pressure to become a perfect student. I kept finding a million reasons why I was coming into graduate school at a disadvantage compared with my peers. As a student from Colombia, I had been educated at institutions my professors and colleagues had never heard of, I spoke with an accent that was hard to understand, and I was older than most of the people in my cohort.

I noticed that most of the people around me seemed to be working all the time. I began to spend many weekday nights and weekends in the lab. But my strategy didn’t work. I crashed from burnout. The tiredness took a toll on my productivity and motivation. During one of many mindless Sundays in the office, I realized I’d fallen into the trap of assuming my colleagues’ work habits were the standard for belonging and being worthy of respect — and it wasn’t sustainable.

From then on, I stopped counting the number of work hours I was putting in, leaving space every day for exercising and doing activities that I enjoyed. Eventually, I realized nobody was keeping track of the amount of time I spent in the lab anyway and it wasn’t something I needed to worry about.

I noticed that having more time for myself made me more rested and motivated when I went back to work. I continued quietly along this path for years, until that conversation in the hallway. So, when I ran into her again, weeks later, I told her that even though I was feeling a lot of pressure in the final year of my Ph.D., I was putting my mental and physical health first and wasn’t working overtime. I also began to talk with other students about how quality sleep, physical activity, healthy eating, and reasonable work hours were a daily part of my routine.

【推荐3】Fergal Keane is a well-known BBC war reporter. His reporting helped his television audiences make sense of the horrors of war, but underneath there were more personal scars attracting him to the frontline.

Fergal had seen violence ever since the early days of his work covering the fighting in Belfast. Having reported wars all over the world, in 1994, he was sent to cover the civil war in Rwanda. But what Fergal saw there shocked him like nothing before, as he told BBC World Service programme, Lives Less Ordinary. “I began to have terrible dreams of Rwanda. And of course, at that stage, it was clear that I was mentally hurt. Did I go to the experts in hospital? No, I didn’t.”

Instead, Fergal turned to drinking alcohol and he had another addiction to deal with - the need to keep returning to war. Fergal knew it wasn’t healthy, but he couldn’t stop.

Around the year 2001, it seemed that war was everywhere, and Fergal kept on reporting - in Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon. But the nightmares didn’t stop, and his mental health got worse and worse. You might expect Fergal to call it a day at this point, but that’s not how addiction works. He just kept getting pulled back in. He reached a point where he couldn’t carry that anymore, and it’s not dramatic, it’s a slow, steady ruin. Fergal had a nervous breakdown - a period of dangerous mental illness, leaving him unable to face his life. At last, he was admitted into hospital, and this time diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD - a mental illness experienced after violent or shocking events.

After his diagnosis of PTSD, he got support and was finally able to stay away from alcohol and war. In his new book, The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD, Fergal discusses his horrible life living with PTSD.