“I want my book back Right now!”

“You told me I could ________ it!” I said confusedly(困惑地).

“Yes, I said you could keep it, but I didn’t say you could lend it to her. I saw her ________ it at lunch!” Brittany pointed into the classroom at Maria.

Now everything made sense.

Brittany was my best ________. We slept over at each other’s houses all the time. She also bought us friendship necklaces.“If you take it off I’ll die of heartbreak.” So I wore it all the time, even as the metal (金属) changed colors and made a mark on my neck.

In Grade Five, we weren’t in the same ________ and I met Maria. Soon, Maria and I did everything together.

However, Brittany was ________. She thought it was Maria who broke the friendship between us. So she ate with Evelyn at lunch. When I came to her, she said, “Why don’t you go and sit with your best friend Maria?” My faces turned red as if she’d hit them with her hand.

Brittany ate lunch with Evelyn for a week. I worried that Brittany had forgotten me. But the next Monday, she acted like ________ had changed. “Come on. We’d better hurry if we want to get our favourite place.”

I had started walking with her when I saw Maria and Andy laughing together. I wanted to know why they were laughing and ________ to look at them.

“No!” said Brittany. She caught my arm. But my hand was holding a glass of chocolate milk. So the milk poured down my dress.

Mum came to bring me new ________. As I changed, she noticed the mark on my neck.“ It’s time to take this off,” she said, unclasping (解开) it. Suddenly, I found myself ________ harder than I had in years.

That was several weeks ago. Brittany and her mom had moved to a different street, without her dad. I worried about her and sometimes I would walk toward her, but then I would stop, with a ________ feeling in my stomach. I didn’t worry that she’d catch my arm. It was something about the way a hedgehog (刺猬) curls (蜷缩)up around its soft stomach when it feels endangered.

“Hello?” Britany was still looking at me.

I thought about all the things I wanted to say. And also I wondered if she ever felt that hedgehog feeling. So, I took a deep breath.

“Brittany” I said. “Are you doing OK? I heard about your dad.”

And then it was Brittany’s turn to cry.

If you find your room in a mess when you look around your room, you’re sure not to be alone.

Cleaning and organizing aren’t the things most people want to do in their spare time, but in fact they aren’t that hard to keep up with, and they can even be fun once you get into a habit! In this article, we’ll help you form your own habit so you can keep your room, locker, and any other spaces you use neat and organized all the time.

It was dark and I was standing in front of a stranger’s house in an unfamiliar street. The little bird waiting inside the house would be my first test as a volunteer wildlife rescuer (救助者).

A kind-looking man led me inside to see my first patient. I would have to look confident, like I’d done this kind of thing many times before. I lifted the edge of the shoe box very slightly to see a bird standing on very thin legs. The bird seemed very aghast, so I decided not to catch it by hand but just move the whole shoe box into my rescue box.

I hadn’t seen this species (物种) of bird before, so I searched the Internet for its information: a rufous fantail, so called because of its red-brown tail feathers that, when fully open, spread out into a neat little “fan”. I phoned the bird specialist of the rescue group. She told me this species hunts insects on the wing and keeping it longer than overnight would only do it harm.

I waited until dusk the next day, which would provide the cover of darkness, to set it free. I held the bird up as high as I could to give it a good lift off and open the flap. The little bird flew off quickly into the darkness.

My first successful rescue was not just a second chance for the bird. Five months earlier, I received a cancer diagnosis (诊断) and I was now at the point where I wasn’t planning my days around hospital visits.

For me, it was making room in my life for wildlife rescue. I’d been interested in animals ever since I was a young girl but had always thought that I’d missed that boat. But I heard about a local wildlife rescue group that was looking for volunteers, and was holding a two-day intensive (强化的) course in wildlife rescue.

I had a free weekend. The only thing stopping me was a lack (缺乏) of confidence. I generally didn’t put my hand up for tasks that I might fail in, especially in public. But the wildlife rescue organization was willing to take a chance on me, then I could find the courage to take on the responsibility of this role.

And one day, there was a small bird picked up by an elderly man who’d looked out of his front window after hearing bird calls. It was in a box waiting just for me.

The typical image of a knitter may be a white-haired lady but in the 1940s, young male Royal Air Force pilots used needles as they waited for their next task. Wartime pilots crashed a lot and knitting helped rebuild flexibility(灵活性) in wounded arms and meanwhile calm wounded minds. They were the basis of early career therapy.

There is increasing evidence that practising creative and meaningful jobs can have a positive influence on health and well-being. Career therapist Jill Riley was part of a team from Cardiff University that surveyed more than 3,500 knitters worldwide and found that the more often people knitted, the calmer and happier they felt. Knitting in a group created happiness, improved social contact and communication with others. As one person surveyed put it,“That rhythm of making stitch (针脚) after stitch is like deep breathing. It’s a flow where you don’t have to stress about it and you’ve got the rhythm happening.”

“Flow”is an invention first named by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentrnihalyi. As he wrote in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, “The best moments in our lives are not the passive or relaxing times. The best moments usually happen if a person’s body or mind is in a voluntary effort to complete something difficult and worthwhile. During the flow, attention is freely paid to achieving a person’s goal because there is no disorder to strengthen out or no threat (威胁) for the self to guard against.”

“When a person can organize his or her mind so as to experience flow as often as possible, the quality of life starts to improve.”An artist, Shauna Richardson, knows just how true this is. The artist spent 18 months in a state of flow when she knitted three seven-metre-long lions for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad.

To complete the task, she says she had to fix all her attention and keep a state of mind driven by rhythm and process (过程). Csikszentrnihalyi also describes the opposite to flow. He points out that although people are healthier and 1ive longer, they often end up feeling anxious and bored, and they are usually cut off from satisfying work.

Because knitting is so accessible(可到达的)—at its heart it’s two sticks and one stitch—it helps people build confidence in their abilities. After all, if you make a mistake, you can just pull it all out and start again.