【推荐1】My fifteen-year-old son has just returned from abroad with rolls of exposed film and a hundred dollars in uncashed traveler’s checks, and is asleep at the moment. His blue duffel (粗呢) bag lies on the floor where he dropped it. Obviously, he postponed as much sleep as he could, when he walked in and we hugged, his electrical system suddenly switched off, and he headed directly for the bed, where I imagine he beat his old record of sixteen hours.

It was his first trip overseas, so weeks before it, I pressed travel books on him, and a tape cassette of useful French phrases; drew up a list of people to visit; advised him on clothing and other things. At the luggage store where we went to buy him a suitcase, he headed for the duffels, saying that suitcases were more for old people.

During the trip, he called home three times: from London, Paris, and a village named Ullapool. Near Ullapool, he climbed a mountain in a rainstorm that almost blew him off. In the village, a man spoke to him in Gaelic, and, too polite to interrupt, my son listened to him for tenor fifteen minutes, trying to nod in the right places. The French he learned from the cassette didn’t hold water in Paris. The French he talked to shrugged and walked on.

When my son called, I sat down at the kitchen table and leaned forward and hung on every word. His voice came through clearly, though two of the calls were like ship-to-shore communication. When I interrupted him with a “Great!” or a “Really?”, I knocked a little hole in his communication. So I just sat and listened. I have never listened to a telephone so attentively and with so much pleasure. It was wonderful to hear news from him that was so new to me. In my book, he was the first man to land on the moon, and I knew that I had no advice to give him and that what I had a ready given was probably not much help.

The unused checks are certainly evidence of that. Youth travels light .No suitcase, not much luggage and a slim expense account, and yet he went to the scene, and came back safely. I sit here amazed. The night when your child returns with dust on his shoes from a country you’ve never seen is a night you would gladly turn into a week.

【推荐2】Why are so many people so afraid of failure？Quite simply because no one tells us how to fail so that failure becomes an experience that will lead to growth. We forget that failure is part of the human condition and that every person has the right to fail.

Most parents work hard at either preventing failure or protecting their children from the knowledge that they have failed. One way is to lower standards. A mother describes her child’s hand-made table as “Perfect！even though it doesn’t stand still. Another way is to shift（转移）blame. If John fails science, his teacher is unfair or stupid.

The trouble with failure-prevention devices is that they leave a child unequipped for life in the real world. The young need to learn that no one can be best at everything, no one can win all the time—and that it’s possible to enjoy a game even when they don’t win. A child who’s not invited to a birthday party, who doesn’t make the honor roll on the baseball team, feels terrible, of course. But parents should not offer a quick consolation（安慰）, prize or say, “It doesn’t matter, because it does. The young should be allowed to experience disappointment—and be helped to master it.

Failure is never pleasurable. It hurts grown-ups and children alike. But it can make a positive（有益的）contribution to your life once you learn to use it. Step one is to ask “Why did I fail？”

Don’t blame someone else. Ask yourself what you did wrong, how you can improve. If someone else can help, don’t be shy about inquiring（咨询）. Success, which encourages repetition of old behavior, is not nearly as good a teacher as failure. You can learn from a bad party how to give a good one, from an ill-chosen first house what to look for in a second. Even a failure that seems definitive can prompt fresh thinking, a change of direction. After 12 years of studying ballet a friend of mine auditioned（面试）for a professional company. She was turned down. “Would further training help？she asked. The ballet master shook his head. “You will never be a dancer”, he said，“you haven’t the body for it. ”

In such cases, the way to use failure is to take stock（鉴定）bravely asking. “What have I left？What else can I do？My friend put away her shoes and moved into dance treatment center, a field where she’s both able and useful. Failure frees one to take risks because there’s less to lose. Often there is recovery（恢复）of energy ─a way to find new possibilities.

Taking charge of yourself involves putting to rest some very prevalent myths. At the top of the list is the notion that intelligence is measured by your ability to solve complex problems, to read, write and compute at certain levels, and to resolve abstract equations quickly.     1    It encourages a kind of intellectual prejudice that has brought with it some discouraging results. We have come to believe that someone who has more educational merit badges, who is very good at some form of school discipline is "intelligent". Yet mental hospitals are filled with patients who have all of the properly lettered certificates. A truer indicator of intelligence is an effective, happy life lived each day and each present moment of every day.     2    

Problem solving is a useful help to your happiness, but if you know that given your inability to resolve a particular concern you can still choose happiness for yourself, or at a minimum refuse to choose unhappiness, then you are intelligent. You are intelligent because you have the ultimate weapon against the big N. B.D. --Nervous Break Down.

"Intelligent" people do not have N. B. D. because they are in charge of themselves.     3    

You can begin to think of yourself as truly intelligent on the basis of how you choose to feel in the face of trying circumstances. The life struggles are pretty much the same for each of us. Everyone who is involved with other human beings in any social context has similar difficulties. Disagreements, conflicts and compromises are a part of what it means to be human.     4    But some people are able to make it, to avoid immobilizing depression and unhappiness despite such occurrences, while others collapse or have an N, B. D. Those who recognize problems as a human condition and don't measure happiness by an absence of problems are the most intelligent kind of humans we know; also, the most rare.

【推荐2】Two years ago, something happened that changed the way I look at the world. On my birthday, my grandfather, walking home with his hands full of groceries, fell and hit his head on the sidewalk. Just as we were leaving to meet him for dinner, we got the call that he was in the hospital. At first, I thought nothing of it, but when I heard the whole story, I couldn’t believe it. He hit his head so hard that he had a blood clot in his brain and it had to be operated on immediately, Everyone thought he would die.

Although my grandfather survived emergency brain surgery, he had complications (后遗症). He could hardly talk and he couldn’t walk. Shortly after, he was admitted to a nursing home. Today, he lives at home with my grandmother and is doing much better, but this isn’t about him. It’s about what I saw at that nursing home.

I saw something that many people haven’t seen, and some do often choose to ignore it, I saw more sadness in those days visiting the nursing home than I thought. In that one place were hundreds of old people who were alone and forgotten.

So what as to be done with the situation of the old? This is not an easy question, but something must be done. Perhaps groups in the community could assign each member to one nursing home patient with whom they could keep in regular contact. Maybe a school could focus on a nursing home and send cards, pictures and letters to residents. If periodic visits were arranged, I’m sure that for some, if not many, those students would be the only visitors they had all month. These are just a few ideas; we all need to work together.

I hope everyone to tour a local nursing home I further expect you to do something about it. You’ll brighten someone’s day, or maybe even his or her life.

【推荐3】Grace and her family thought they had lost Thor forever when they moved to Windsor, Nova Scotia from British Columbia last August.

“We probably spent seven or eight months looking for Thor,” Grace said. “What made it worse was that there were rumors(谣言) going around that there was dogfighting in our area. We still always hoped that somebody had taken him to be a pet, but you just never knew.”

“It was terrible. My daughter Bronwyn would try to find Thor everywhere, which had been a Christmas present for her. Even while watching TV programmes, she would say, ‘Oh, look! That dog looks like Thor!’” Grace said. Then the family moved, and the hope became impossible.

But one day, the phone rang. It was their former vet in British Columbia, saying Thor was in a rescue shelter(收容所) in High River, Alberta. He had been found at a work camp in the northern part of the place and taken to south by a man planning to keep him. But the man was forced to turn him over to the shelter when he couldn’t keep Thor in his rented home. Luckily, the ring on Thor’s neck gave people some information.

Thor was flown to Nova Scotia last week. The family picked him up at the airport. “Thor was just lying in his box and looking down, and my daughter walked over and said, ‘Hey Thor.’ He immediately stood up, trying to greet my daughter. We let him out and he jumped on her as if he was giving her a big hug and he kissed her face. Then he sat down suddenly at her feet and rolled over for attention. He was cute.” Grace said.