1 . Devon Gallagher, a college graduate from Philadelphia, wants the world to know exactly where she’s been during her worldwide vacation in a special way.

The traveler, who was born with a congenital bone disease (先天性骨病), had her right leg amputated (截肢) at the age of four. Although the amputation caused misfortune for Gallagher early on, she now sees it as an inspiration for living her best life.

To spread that message, Gallagher has taken to social media, where she shares photos of her travels around the world. Besides, she writes her location across her artificial leg (假肢) before taking a picture.

Now she has been taking pictures across Europe, which show her cycling over the canals in Amsterdam, relaxing on a wall overlooking the city of Barcelona, posing with a waffle (华夫饼) in Brussels, taking breath-taking pictures in Athens and enjoying a river cruise (巡航) in Budapest, with all the well-known locations written on her artificial leg.

“I get a new leg every two years and I can choose the design on it. One day I had a sudden idea to get a chalkboard (黑板),” Gallagher said. “My mum and grandmother didn't like the idea, but my friends thought it was great and told me to go for it, so I did.”

Gallagher said people often stare when she’s writing on her leg, but once she shared the photos, she received only positive comment. “My leg hasn't stopped me doing anything I’ve wanted to do, I know it’s my determination to prove to myself that I can do it. Therefore, I’ve been able to keep up with my peers (同龄人) and lead a pretty great life.”

Gallagher shows us that you should never let anything stand in the way of your dreams. If life gives you an artificial leg, make art.

3 . Are parents rational (理性的) about their children? No. Parents aren’t rational because ________ isn’t rational. Young people can understand this about romantic love, but they find it ________ to accept this part in parental love.

My eldest daughter’s ________ the other day brought this up. “Let me ask you something, Dad,” she began in patiently controlled ________ that every experienced parent knows.

“I sailed around the Mediterranean in a yacht (游艇) when I was seventeen,” she said. “I hiked through the Pyrenees from Spain to Paris. I’ve done rock climbing and deep-sea diving and slept in rainforests in the jungle of Indonesia. Right?”

“Right,” I said, “So what?”

“So this,” she went on. “When I go to the corner drugstore to pick up some shampoo, why do you always tell me to be ________ when I cross the street?”

There is no satisfactory ________ a parent can give to this.

All I could say in reply was that when I was 50, my mother would ________ me not to drive too fast. If I were 80 and she were still alive, I would be getting the ________ warning. No matter what the age, a child is a child.

There is something else, too, that children find it hard to understand. When they are far away, there is nothing we can do about their ________. They are in the hands of the gods. Parents try not to ________ about it.

But when the children are close, the old protective urge quickly ________, and it doesn’t ________ how far they have been or what experiences they have got through.

Most ________ happen around the corner, not in the rainforest. The most instinctive (本能的) act of almost every creature is to ________ its young, and with humans this reaction stays for a lifetime.

In the parents’ mind, a child ages but does not ________. Rational? No. But if we were rational, would we want children at all?

4 . Climbing, I once thought, was a very manly activity, but as I found my way into this activity, I came to see that something quite different happens on the rock.

Like wild swimming, rock climbing involves you into the landscape. On the rock, I am fully focused. Eyes pay close attention, ears are alert, and hands move across the surface. Unlike walking, where I could happily wander about absent-mindedly, in climbing, attentive observation is essential.

As an arts student studying English literature, I discovered a new type of reading from outdoor climbing. Going out on to the crags (悬崖), I saw how you could learn to read the rocks and develop a vocabulary of physical movements. Good climbers knew how to adjust their bodies on to the stone. Watching them, I wanted to possess that skillful “language”.

My progress happened when I worked for the Caingorms National Park Authority. Guiding my explorations into this strange new landscape was Nan Shepherd, a lady too. Unlike the goal-directed mindset of many mountaineers, she is not concerned with peaks or personal achievement. Shepherd sees the mountain as a total environment and she celebrates the Caingorms as a place alive with plants, rocks, animals and elements. Through her generous spirit and my own curiosity, I saw that rock climbing need not be a process of testing oneself against anything. Rather, the intensity of focus could develop a person into another way of being.

Spending so much time in high and stony places has transformed my view on the world and our place in it. I have come into physical contact with processes that go way beyond the everyday. Working with gravity, geology (地质学), rhythms of weather and deep time, I gain an actual relationship with the earth. This bond lies at the heart of my passion for rock climbing. I return to the rocks, because this is where I feel in contact with our land.

5 . Sometimes life can seem challenging (挑战的) and we usually get the feeling of “the grass on the other side is always greener”! We usually feel ______ with the troubles that life throws at us.

The best thing to do at that point of time is to ______ our eyes and start counting of all the ______ in life that God has given us.

If we think ______, our life is full of blessings that we hardly ______. Listening to the singing of birds early in the morning, we realize that there are many people who spend their life in a world that is ______ while many others spend their lives in a world that is dark and may have never ______ a rainbow or the setting sun.

When you go out for a drive, pull down the window and look at the poor ______ standing under the hot sun, begging for filling his hungry ______. We get three ______ a day without realizing its importance. Isn’t that a blessing?

Whenever you are sad, look at the eyes of your parents and family filled with love and ______ for you. There are many people who have never ______ the love of a family. Isn’t that a blessing?

As Mother Teresa once said, “We don’t need to do ______ things. We need to do small things with great ____”.

The key to a happy life is when we ______ others problems to be our own and try to help them. When we love people without any ______ and help them, our heart is filled with a ______ of happiness and peace seeing the ______ on their face.

So the next time whenever life ______ you down, close your eyes and…start ______!

7 . After long hours of waiting for my friend at the bus station, I got tired and wanted to just leave and plan another meeting.

As I was still deciding, there came a man selling shoes and started showing them to me so that I could buy or something. I just smiled and said “thank you”. I don’t know if it was the smile or what but the young man stepped closer and stood beside me and started talking to me. “You know I didn’t just end up like this, selling shoes. I had a life… had a family but one day life just turned upside down and all was gone just like that,” he said. In short, his wife stole all his money, sold his car and house. It was really a hard time for him and he was psychologically anguished. A lot happened and then he decided to pick up the pieces of his life. That’s when he started making and selling shoes to earn a living.

As I stood there listening to him pour out his heart and story of his life. I was still surprised how in the world can someone be so open to a total stranger like that and it occurred to me that some people get relieved that way. You see, a lot of times we meet people and most of them have burdens in their hearts and some of them don’t even have a person to talk to, so I’ve learned to be good to all people and always give them my time to listen to what they have to say. By doing this it will not only help that particular person but also the one who listens since you get to learn something and see the other side of life.

8 . “Lei ming m ming baak ngo gong ge waa ah? Do you understand what I am saying?” I stare back at the speaker dumbly, my lips parted, the ideas clear in my mind but a response unable to express itself in a language in my distant range. After an uncomfortable pause, a bunch of words spill out of my mouth, sounding forced and unnatural.

The anecdote (轶事) above is a semi-conversation I had in Malaysia years ago. A three-week stay in Malaysia once every few years was often the highlight of my summers—what more can you ask from a food paradise? But besides the family, food, and escape that Malaysia offered, trips also brought accompanying feelings of guilt that I just couldn’t seem to translate. For one month every few summers, I got a taste of what it feels to be an outsider in my own culture, peering in. I was a girl lost in translation, passively absorbing the various tongues shouted between the stalls in the wet markets, quietly nodding along at my grandparents’ huge family dinners.

In America though, I am a different person. I don’t think twice about my grammar when speaking. I don’t struggle with the words and fear that my logic and stories won’t get through to people. So as a native English speaker, I do not have to worry daily about whether I’m judged for having an accent or whether I’m misunderstood across languages. In Malaysia, I naturally burst out “have you eaten?” instead of recalling the Malaysian equivalent “you makan already?” In Malaysia, everything about the way I speak-my accent, intonation, sentence structure, slang-gives me away. My American-ness is seen in the way I talk, dress, and act. Maybe my face could pass for a Malaysian local, but once I open my mouth to speak I am so clearly not. It is uncomfortable and awkward, and sometimes I wonder if I did not look Asian at all would it be better, since there would be no more language expectation for me than for a white tourist.

9 . “Tell me the story of me, Momma,” my daughter Sophie always asks when we sit on my grandmother’s rocking chair at the end of the day. “The first time I saw your beautiful face, it was nearly covered by a blue-and-white hat. You were surrounded by a soft blue blanket (毛毯). All I could see was a rosy face.” “And I looked like a tiny fairy baby?” she asks. “You did, and you weren’t older than a minute,” I always answer. “The nurse handed a tiny little girl to me, and I was so surprised because you felt so light. I thought if I threw off the blanket, I’d find no baby there at all, only air.”

From that moment, I became a mother. But that moment was just special and magical as if she’d come from my body directly into my arms. From that day on, she was my daughter in every way that mattered.

It’s easy sometimes to forget there was another mother out there with whom I share my title. Sophie’s birth mother, who was also my friend, lost her life to cancer not long after giving birth to Sophie. And I’ll never forget that it was her difficult decision — her tears and her pain — that made me a mom.

As my daughter grows, she will understand that sometimes life is a relay race (接力赛), and you never know who in this world will hand you your baton (接力棒). It could be someone you know for years, or it could be someone who you even never meet, someone you will never be able to repay for giving you the life you always wanted.

10 . For me, two of the loveliest words in English are “Life persists”.

I ________ them years ago as a college student, sitting in the library, ________, working on a paper. Out of nowhere, those words came ________ off the page in a quote: “In the midst of death life persists; in the midst of ________ truth persists; in the midst of darkness light persists.”

Suddenly I wasn’t unhappy and impatient any more. Then I called my grandfather. I loved to talk with him. And I was desperate to ________ what he’d think of it. He had poor hearing, so I had to repeat it a few times, but once he ________ it, he laughed. “All I can say to that is totally ________,” he said on the phone. I told him how glad I was, after a long winter, to finally see spring and ________ to find that quote. “Why is that?” he asked. “Well, spring is a sure ________ that life persists. And it just makes me ________.”

He laughed again, and then in his lovely voice, he recited to me his ________ “spring time” words: “The desert shall rejoice (欣喜), and ________ as the rose.”

Many years later, when my husband and I drove across a desert with many wildflowers and blooming cactuses (仙人掌), I could almost hear my grandfather ________: “The desert shall rejoice.”

Life persists, and so do we, in the silence of ________ and the blooming of cactuses; and in the dead of winter and the green of spring. Spring ________ us that we’re alive forever.