While I was living in the south of France, I drove all the way to Barcelona to buy a very special guitar. Once I was back home with my treasured, finely finished（抛光的）wooden instrument, my father asked if he could play it. He loved flamenco（弗拉曼柯舞曲）guitar music and decided to show off his skills. ________ I knew it, he was tapping（轻敲）on the smooth top of my classical guitar with his fingernails（指甲）!

Guitars that meant for playing lively flamenco music had tap plates（敲板）to protect themselves from fingernail damage. My father did not realize that my classical guitar did not have a tap plate. I was horrified, but I ________ said, “Here, let me show you what I can play” as I took back my guitar.

I ________ to admit（承认）this, but for years, whenever I played my guitar, I couldn`t help noticing the marks. I felt bad about feeling annoyed because my father was so nice to me and I really loved everything about him.

After having my third child, I didn’t have as much time to practice, so the guitar stayed safely in its case for years. During that time, my father ________ away sadly and I was extremely sad for a long time. Then one day, I was in the mood to start playing my guitar and I opened the case for the first time in a long while. Once again, I noticed the fingernail marks on my guitar.

It was a moment that took my breath ________ . Those marks—my father had made them—yes, my father had made them. He was there—a part of him was there on the bright and smooth top of my guitar. How wonderful! I was so happy to see those little scratches made by the tapping of his fingers and all of a sudden my guitar was even more ________ than ever before. My father was a very wise man and I learned so much from him when he was alive—and now he was still ________ me. My viewpoint on what was important changed. What had once seemed like defects（瑕疵）on my guitar were beautiful little souvenirs of time spent with my father.

I promised from that day on to always appreciate life’s little ________ with the people I loved. Whenever I find myself about to “sweat the small stuff”, I think of my father and my beautiful guitar with the lovely marks.

Hello. My name is Jacob Herrmann, and I am the founder and webmaster of PenPal World. And I am the only person who is running PenPal World since the first day 20 years ago.

I grew up on the south side of Switzerland on the border of Italy in the beautiful famous Swiss Alps. When I was 25, after three years of schooling, I received a diploma as a car body printer, but I left my job for something greater.

So in 1998 I moved to the Los Angeles area of California, where I went to Santa Monica College and majored in Computer Science. There I also started PenPal World, an idea that came to me in the middle of a sleepless night. I also met my wife then, Linda, who is Vietnamese, and we married in 1999 in Santa Ana.

After graduating from college in 2001, I was accepted into Cal State Long Beach University. However, instead of going back to school, I decided to jump into the work world and started working as a webmaster for television. com. In Spring 2004, my family and I moved to Connecticut where my wife opened her Vietnamese restaurant. Although the restaurant was successful, the very cold winter got to us, so after about a year and a half we decided to move back to Northern California. We moved again in summer 2007 to Yorba Linda, after an offer from Walt Disney Internet Group in North Hollywood to work for them as a senior web programmer. Five years later I started working for LegalZoom.com until the summer of 2016. And on July 6, 2016, I finally worked for PenPal World full time!

Some people e-mailed me thinking that PenPal World is a big company. It’s not. PenPal World has been run only by me since the very beginning. I work every day on PenPal World, usually from my home office in California, but sometimes from my laptop anywhere in the world. PenPal World is really a year-round job. I usually spend two to six hours a day choosing pictures, answering support questions, thinking about features, and programming.

I guess you can hear my enthusiasm（热情）for PenPal World, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. And please don’t forget to tell your friends about it.

“Rejection and acceptance are central to our lives. Have a look around your living room.” says Nathan Dewall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky. “If you turn on the television, and watch any reality TV program, most of them are about rejection and acceptance,” he says. The reason, DeWall says, is that acceptance—in relationships, from friends, even from strangers—is absolutely necessary to humans.

In a new paper published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, DeWall and coauthor Brad J. Bushman review recent psychological research on social acceptance and rejection. The results have highlighted(强调) how central acceptance is to our lives. “Although psychologists have been interested in close relationships, it’s only been about 15 years that psychologists have been doing this work on exclusion and rejection,” DeWall says.

DeWall thinks belonging to a group was helpful to our ancestors. We have weak claws, little fur, and long childhoods; living in a group helped early humans survive harsh environments. Because of that, being part of a group still helps people feel safe and protected.

But acceptance has an evil twin: rejection. Being rejected is bad for your health. “People who feel excluded and lonely tend to have poor physical health,” DeWall says. They don’t sleep well, their immune(免疫) systems are not strong, and they even tend to die sooner than people who are surrounded by others who care about them.

Being excluded is also associated with poor mental health. People with depression may face exclusion more often because of the symptoms(症状) of their disorder—and being rejected makes them more depressed, DeWall says. People with social anxiety worried about being socially rejected.

Exclusion isn’t just a problem for the person who suffers it, either; it can change the whole society, DeWall says. People who have been excluded often treat others badly. In experiments, they give people much more hot water than they can stand, blame strangers with loud noise, and give terrible comments of job interviewees. Rejection can even lead to violence.

It’s important to know how to deal with rejection. First of all, “We should assume(假定) that everyone is going to experience rejection on a semi-regular basis throughout their life,” DeWall says. It’s impossible to go through your entire life with everyone being nice to you. When you are rejected or excluded, the best way to deal with it is to look for other sources of friendship or acceptance. “A lot of times, people keep these things to themselves because they’re embarrassed or they don’t think it’s very important,” he says. But our bodies respond to rejection like they do to physical pain; the pain should be taken seriously, and it’s fine to look for support. “When people feel lonely, or when people feel excluded or rejected, these are things they can talk about,” he says.

Most of us spend our lives looking for the natural world, so we walk the dog, go fishing, sit in the garden, and go to the seaside instead of simply staying inside. The most popular free time activity in Britain is going for a walk. And when joggers jog, they probably head to the park or the river. It is my firm belief that not only do we all need nature, but we all look for nature, whether we know we are doing so or not.

A study in Sweden showed that kindergarten children who could play in a natural environment had less illness and better physical ability（体能）than children who played on a normal playground. But too frequently, parents don’t allow their children to play in natural spaces, for health and safety reasons, for fear that they might get dirty or that they might cause damage（损害）. So, instead, the damage is done to the children themselves: not to their bodies but to their souls.

One of the great problems of modern childhood is ADHD（多动症）, now increasingly and expensively treated with medicine. Yet one study after another shows that contact（接触）with nature gives huge benefits to ADHD children. However, we usually spend money on medicine instead of green places.

The life of old people is much better when they get close to nature. The most important for the growing population of old people is in quality（质量）rather than quantity of years. And study finds that a garden is the single most important thing in finding that quality.

According to experts, even problems with crime and aggressive behavior are reduced when there is contact with the natural world, for it helps reduce anger and behavior that people might regret later.

We tend to think we are doing nature some kind of favor（恩惠）when we are protecting nature. The mistake here is far too deep: humans need nature for themselves, and it is simply impossible to separate humanity and the natural world.

Human beings are a species of animals. For seven million years we have lived on the planet as part of nature. So we miss the natural world and long for contact with non-human life. Anyone who has patted a dog, sat under a tree with a glass of beer, or given or received a bunch of flowers, understands that.

We need the wild world. It is necessary to our health and our happiness. Without other living things around us, we are less than human.