2 . Do I think the sky is falling? Sort of.

My husband and I were recently in Egypt, where the temperature was a bit warm for my tiny princess self. So, we left Egypt. Back home, my dearest friends struggled with health stuff, with family craziness…

The game of life is hard, and a lot of us are playing hurt.

I ache for the world but naturally I’m mostly watching the Me Movie, where balance and strength are beginning to fail. What can we do as the creaking elevator of age slowly arrives? The main solution is to get outside every day, ideally with friends. Old friends even thoughts of them-are my comfort.

Recently I was walking along a beach with Neshama. We go back 50 years. She is 84, short and strong. Every so often, she bent down somewhat tentatively (踌躇地) and picked up small items into a small cloth bag. “What are you doing?”

“I’m picking up micro litter. I try to help where I can.”

I reminded her of an old story. A great warhorse comes upon a tiny sparrow (麻雀) lying on its back with its feet in the air, eyes tightly shut with effort. The horse asks it what it’s doing.

“I’m trying to help hold back the darkness.”

The horse laughs loudly, “That is so funny. What do you weigh?”

And the sparrow replies, “One does what one can.”

This is what older age means. We do what we can.

We continued our walk. Neshama bent tentatively to pick up bits of litter and started to slip, but I caught her and we laughed. We are so physically weak in older age, but friendship makes it all a rowing machine for the soul. We can take it, as long as we feel and give love, and laugh gently at ourselves as we fall apart. We know by a certain age the great lies in our life—if you do or achieve this or that, you will be happy and rich. Love and service make us rich.

4 . After years of observing human nature, I have decided that two qualities make the difference between men of great achievement and men of average performance curiosity and discontent. I have never known an outstanding man who lacked either. And I have never known an average man who had both. The two belong together.

Together, these deep human urges (驱策力) count for much more that ambition. Galileo was not merely ambitious when he dropped objects of varying weights from the Leaning Tower at Pisa and timed their fall to the ground. Like Galileo, all the great names in history were curious and asked in discontent,“Why? Why? Why?”

Fortunately, curiosity and discontent don’t have to be learned. We are born with them and need only recapture them.

“The great man,” said Mencius (孟子), “is he who does not lose his child’s heart.” Yet most of us do lose it. We stop asking questions. We stop challenging custom. We just follow the crowd. And the crowd desires restful average. It encourages us to occupy our own little corner, to avoid foolish leaps into the dark, to be satisfied.

Most of us meet new people, and new ideas, with hesitation. But once having met and liked them, we think how terrible it would have been, had we missed the chance. We will probably have to force ourselves to waken our curiosity and discontent and keep them awake.

How should you start? Modestly, so as not to become discouraged. I think of one friend who couldn’t arrange flowers to satisfy herself. She was curious about how the experts did it. How she is one of the experts, writing books on flower arrangement.

One way to begin is to answer your own excuses. You haven’t any special ability? Most people don’t; there are only a few geniuses. You haven’t any time? That’s good, because it’s always the people with no time who get things done. Harriet Stowe, mother of six, wrote parts of Uncle Tom’s Cabin while cooking. You’re too old? Remember that Thomas Costain was 57 when he published his first novel, and that Grandma Moses showed her first pictures when she was 78.

However you start, remember there is no better time to start than right now, for you’ll never be more alive than you are at this moment.

5 . There was a man playing the piano in a bar. He was a good piano player and always performed in this bar. People came in just to hear him play. But one night, a customer told him that he didn’t want to hear him just play the piano any more. He wanted him to sing a song.

The man said, “I don’t sing.”

But the customer was persistent. He told the bar manager, “I’m tired of listening to the piano. I want that man to sing!”

The manager shouted across the room, “If you want to get paid, sing a song. Our customers are asking you to sing!”

So he did. He sang a song. A piano player who had never sung in public did so for the first time. And everyone was surprised by his song Mona Lisa. He got lots of applause that night.

He had such a talent for singing, but he just had been sitting on his talent for the past years! If without such an opportunity, he might have lived the rest of his life as a no-name piano player in a no-name bar. However, now he has become one of the best known singers in America.

You, too, have skills and abilities. Maybe your “talent” is not as great as the singer’s above, but it may be better than you think! And with effort, most skills can be improved. So, in your life, you should be brave enough to try doing different things and find out what talents you really have!

6 . A few years ago I went through a period of such severe depression that life didn’t seem worth living. It was like permanent _________, so dark and cold that the sun would never shine.

Then I saw snowdrops pushing through the _________, iron-hard ground. I looked at them every day until I felt that if they could _________, then so could I.

_________ spring came, I started to put in more and more plants, until the garden was _________ with colour. Life was growing through my hands, gentle, peaceful, but, above all, _________. If I gave love, it was _________, a hundred times.

I could spend hours _________ in gardening. The form of depressive illness I have is biological. It has _________ generations of my family and follows no rhyme, reason nor circumstance. I can be __________ when the sun is shining or I am surrounded by a group of loving friends.

Of course, fresh air and exercise help to __________ depression, but for me gardening is more than that. It represents endurance as well as __________.

At the end of the first garden I made __________ a tree, huge and magnificent. It withstood freezing temperatures and strong winds. It bent but never broke.

The leaves dropped until it looked no more than a(n) __________ skeleton (骨架), but it always, always came back to life. And so I learned that we may be battled and __________, but hope is a living thing.

8 . When my son was eleven years old, he came home from school in tears one day. A couple of the older kids bullied (欺负) him at the bus stop. Rob wanted to stay home from school, so he wouldn’t have to meet the boys.

We called the school. “We’ll be happy to call the boys’ parents,” We were told, “And you should call the police.” “We don’t know what we will do yet.” I said. I felt that calling the police was a choice to be used when everything else failed, and I wanted first to consider other ways of dealing with the situation, I asked him to hold off calling the boys’ parents.

The next day was Saturday. Rob happened to look our of the window and said in fer, “There are the boys who beat me up!” Two older boys were standing in front of our house, as if they were waiting for Rob to step outside.

My wife Bev opened the door and said with a smile, “Hi guys. Would you like some ice cream?” They looked at each other in puzzlement. But they were teenagers, after all, so one of them said, “Sure. Why not?”

Bev quickly introduced herself, Rob’s younger brothers and me. She even introduced Rusty, the dog. “And I think you already know Rob,” She said. Her idea was to help them to see that Rob was a person, not a target. He had a family and even owned a family pet.

Bev drew the boys into chat while we ate ice cream. After a few minutes, she said, “I know there’s been some trouble at the bus stop. I think there may be a misunderstanding.” They nodded that there had indeed been trouble at the bus stop. She continued, “Maybe we can talk about the misunderstanding, so you can be friends.” We talked until the ice cream was finished. Finally the boys apologized.

Understanding is a difficult task. It may be easier to control conflict by force than to find a way to cooperate. Force can calm a situation. But understanding leads to peace.

10 . I’m now the cook and owner of a restaurant. Nothing in my early years led me to _______ my life would connect to food and cooking deeply. My family did eat together often: we had a _______ that my grandmother cooked the weekly big meal on weekends, but food was hardly the _______ of my family’s story. After I entered college. I was still _______ about what I wanted to do. I was “supposed” to _______ my family, getting a degree in medicine at graduate school or something similar.

When accepting the job assisting cooks after finishing college, I just _______ to pay my rent. That didn’t _______ any big life plans. However, as I worked longer, the food world showed me amazing _______.

Too little salt, and a dish is _______ to be “tastelss”. A bit lemon juice helps prevent cut apples and peaches from turning brown and ________ their appealing colors. The lesson that small things matter reminds me to never ________ tiny stuff in all parts of life.

Also, working with food teaches me to really taste, smell and touch. I learn to observe my ________, watching ways birds land, the growth of trees along roads… and ________ wonders in everyday life. ________, I head down my own path, which is ________ from going to medical school as my parents did, but gives my life purpose and direction.