1 . When my mom passed away only a few years after we’d lost Dad, the wound of my grief was ________ and deep. To save myself from ________, I play a game I call “It’s 1980”. Best done during a walk in the woods, always done alone, the rules are simple: Think of every single ________ of the year 1980, which was a very happy year for my family.

As I walk along the path through the park, I ________ each family member and picture what they might have been doing. Dad is in the garage, working on a car ________. I can smell fresh paint. Mom is in the kitchen, with another delicious supper in the slow cooker. On and on I go, letting this daydream become my ________ reality, feeling myself ________ the scent of what Mom’s cooking, the ________ of the breeze blowing in the open kitchen window.

________, on my walk, I come to the end and need to ________ the present. Having had my ________ vacation in the past, this is easy because I’ve realized that the girl who knew such happiness and love is still here, in the woman I am today. And I long to share the game with those struggling over the ________. It’s true that ________ have changed for me. ________, with “It’s 1980”, my loving memories can serve as a ________ that all is not lost, has never been lost.

2 . Biar Kon grew up in a refugee camp in Kenya, after his parents were forced to flee the war in neighboring Sudan. When he was 17, he moved to Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, to ________ school.

Once he arrived, he needed to get some ________ from the Sudanese embassy. But when he went looking for the embassy, he couldn’t find it. Then an older woman ________ him on the back, “Hey, my son, how are you doing?” The woman told Kon that she had seen him asking questions of ________ people as they passed, and she wondered if he needed some help. The woman’s ________ left a deep impression on Kon. And it inspired him to pay it ________, five years later, when he moved to Boston, Massachusetts.

One day, outside a coffee shop, he ________ an interaction between a young woman and a(n) ________ man that troubled her. Kon went up to the man, to see what he could do. “He told me why he was on the street — because he made a mistake when he was in high school, and he couldn’t get a ________ now,” Kon recalled.

Kon bought the man some breakfast, and gave him a little bit of money. Today, it’s an encounter he ________ on often. For him, it was a reminder that you never know what people are ________ unless you make a point to talk to them.

“She kind of sowed a seed of ________ in me. And every time I see somebody who’s in trouble, I always try to ________,” Kon said.

Kon is now a student at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He hopes to provide housing and social support for people ________ on the streets — an idea partly inspired by his unsung ________.

5 . Ralph Street loves maps. Appropriately (相称) for someone with his surname, he studied geography and town planning. And well before that, his parents _________ took him out orienteering (定向运动).

“I don’t really remember a time before orienteering,” Street _________. “My parents took me orienteering the first week I was born.” He now _________ internationally as an orienteer. In 2023, he won the first place in Orienteering World Cup. Street remembers a childhood trip with friends who trusted him as they realized his excellent _________ for getting around the new city.

Street _________ the sport of orienteering at the age of nine. As his experiences suggest, childhood exposure shapes people’s comfort and _________ with navigation (导航).

People who grew up outside cities, or in more spatially (空间的) complex cities, also appear to be better able to navigate. “Even as adults, we have good _________ that people who navigate more widely around their environment have better spatial skills,” says Nora Newcombe, a psychology professor at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Misconceptions _________ about human navigation. “One of them is that you think you cannot improve,” Newcombe says. Navigational _________ like maps and compasses can lead to a dependence. People can train themselves to better notice environmental __________ like the wind, the sun and slopes.

For people who can’t imagine wayfinding without a phone app, there are still ways to __________ spatial skills. The system on many apps is that “wherever you’re going is straight ahead, which is a terrible way to learn. I advocate keeping north on the top all the time,” Newcombe __________ . Getting a(an) __________ amount of sleep may help too. One global study found that for participants __________ fifty and older, sleeping seven hours a night __________ the best performance in a navigation game.

7 . Even with the heated water splashing on my shoulders, a chill (寒意) still ran through me. My son was swimming _______ along the bottom of the pool. He surfaced and said, “I’ll show you how to swim underwater.”Usually I was a(n) _______ student, but not this time.

I just couldn’t trust my body to _______.My anxious mind would not let go. Over the years, I had learned not to sink, but I had never found the _______ of swimming that came easily to my friends. Self-doubt hardened into a _______:I couldn’t swim underwater.

But my son George wouldn’t _______ this. “Can you try?” His waiting face was open with possibility. I thought of the_______ things we had asked of him. The days I left him at preschool, he wept bitterly as I _______.The times he bared his arm for shots from the doctor. Earlier times in pools when he, too, _______ deep water.

I couldn’t say no. “Try to swim to me. It’s not very far.” he said, ________ above the water.His voice,calm and encouraging,   ________ me. “When I count to three, you start, OK?” I didn’t move. “Let’s try again,” he said in his teacher voice. “One, two, three!”

After more false starts, I knew I must ________.I sucked in air, squeezed my eyes shut, and aimed like a torpedo (鱼雷) into the dark. I traveled ________ in this liquid world, just pushing forward. I ________ my breath until I couldn’t anymore. I burst up into cool air. “I did it!” I said, tears of ________ streaming down my smiling face.George smiled too. “Now,” he continued, “try to go a little farther.”

I swam farther.I swam.

9 . In 1999, when she was 23, Roxanne Olson left her home in Eureka, California to pursue a dream job, as an assistant producer on a cross-country tour. But party through the _________, she got some terrible news — her father had died of a sudden heart attack.

“I was _________ enough to not even understand that death was part of my world. And so it was a crazy _________,” Olson remembered.

Olson was able to get a plane ticket home, but when she arrived at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, things went _________. Someone had run through security with a bag, _________ the shutdown of the airport.

“It turned out it was over 6,000 people evacuated from the O’Hare airport that day,” Olson said. After _________ of waiting, Olson and the other travelers were allowed back in. But the airport was in complete _________. As she stood there, feeling more and more overwhelmed, a woman approached her, pushing an empty _________.

“And she _________ to me and she said, ‘I’m here to help people like you,’” Olson said. __________, Olson got in the wheelchair. As the woman __________ them through the airport, Olson told her about her father’s death, and her __________ to return back home to California.

“And she just seemed to understand my problem — she talked to whoever the right people were, and she got me on the very first __________ out.”

Olson __________ it home that day. She says she’ll never forget the woman who made it possible. “She just __________ that I was broken and needed help. And she saved me.”