Perhaps you think you could easily add to your happiness with more money. Strange as it may seem, if you're unsatisfied, the issue is not a lack of means to meet your desires but a lack of desires—not that you cannot satisfy your tastes but that you don't have enough tastes.

    Real riches consist of well-developed and hearty capacities (能力) to enjoy life. Most people are already swamped(淹没) with things. They eat, wear, go and talk too much.They live in too big a house with too many rooms, yet their house of life is a deserted hut.

    Your house of life ought to be a mansion (豪宅) , a royal palace.  Every new taste, every additional interest, every fresh enthusiasm adds a room.  Here are several rooms your house of life should have.

    Art should be a desire for you to develop simply because the world is full of beautiful things. If you only understood how to enjoy them and feed your spirit on them, they would make you as happy as to find plenty of ham and eggs when you're hungry.

    Literature, classic literature, is a beautiful, richly furnished room where you might find many an hour of rest and refreshment. To gain that love would go toward making you a rich person, for a rich person is not someone who has a library but who likes a library.

    Music like Mozart's and Bach's shouldn't be absent. Real riches are of the spirit. And when you've brought that spirit up to where classical music feeds it and makes you a little drunk, you have increased your thrills and bettered them. And life is a matter of thrills.

    Sports, without which you remain poor, mean a lot in life. No matter who you are, you would be more human, and your house of life would be better supported against the had days, if you could, and did, play a bit.

    Whatever rooms you might add to your house of life, the secret of enjoying life is to keep adding.

    When we think of a generation gap we usually think of conflicting tastes in music, or pastimes. But now the generation gap is handwriting. After one teacher in Tennessee discovered that she had students who couldn't read the assignments she was writing on the board, she posted it on the Internet saying handwriting should be taught in schools.

    Opponents claim that handwriting has become out of time in our modern world. Typed words have become a primary form of communication. Once a practical kill handwriting is no longer used by the vast majority of Americans. It is no longer taught in schools, and some claim that the time that it would take to teach it could be put to better use, for instance, by teaching the technical skills.

    But even in today's world there are still plenty of reasons to pick up a pen and apply it to paper. Many American institutions still require original signatures, for instance, signing for a registered letter and buying a house. And original signatures are much more difficult to forge(伪造) than their digital counterparts. There is also strong evidence that writing by hand is good for the mind. It activates a different part of the brain, and improves fine moving skills in young children. People also tend to remember what they write by hand more than what they type, and the process of writing by hand has been shown to stimulate ideas. Besides, studies have shown that kids who write by hand learn to read and spell earlier than those who don't. Not to mention, handwriting is pleasing, as is evidenced by the fact that no one has ever typed a love letter. And handwriting remains popular as an art form.

    Yes, we live in a modern world, but we live in a modern world that is based on fundamental values.

    Gesture is the use of such movements to express thought, emotion, etc. A gesture can be many things. Slamming a book shut shows anger and frustration. Opening a door lor someone shows kindness. Gestures go much beyond small actions.

    My friend once told me a story in high school. One day he met a girl who was on the girls' basketball team. He said hello, gave her a hard handshake and wished her good luck as she had a game later. He came to find out he saved that girl's life. She had planned on committing suicide and by shaking her hand and saying good luck, he made her realize someone really cared about her. I'm not saying all actions are going to change someone else's life that much, but it may make their day better.

    Gestures can be negative too. In my senior year of high school, a guy on my football team was late and was walking down the field to practice. Everyone on the team knows our coach hates it when people are late and walk on the field. He was walking in as if he owned the place and had no care of what his teammates were thinking. His body language had never been good. The other players on the team had never liked him because of his body language.

    Gestures can often say more than a person wants. One day I was mad at my parents for some pointless reason. All day I stayed downstairs. When one of them walked by, I would just stare at the TV or my phone and hope they wouldn't try to start a conversation. When they tried to talk to me, I would give one-word answers. Sitting on the couch and watching TV by myself all day was not my intent but that was what my gestures told my parents.

    One simple gesture can change a person's thoughts, day or maybe even save their lives. If everyone made a nice gesture to someone else every day, our school, town, and world would become a better place. One single act of random kindness at a time or a kind gesture can change the world.

The thing that sets children apart from adults is not their ignorance, nor their lack of skills. Rather, it's their enormous capability for joy. A friend told me a story. One day, when she went to get his 6-year-old son from soccer practice, her kid greeted her with a sad face. The teacher had criticized him for not focusing on his soccer drills. The little boy walked out of the school with his head and shoulders hanging down. He seemed wrapped in sadness. But before reaching the car door, he suddenly stopped, crouching(蹲伏) down to look at something on the sidewalk. “Mom, come here! This is the strangest bug I've ever seen. It has, like, a million legs. It's amazing!” The little face was overflowing with indescribable excitement.

Nowadays, however, when we walk into a classroom, especially in a high school, we'll be choked by towering books and papers, and hiding behind them are a group of motionless creatures, pens in hand, minds dry, just as the hollow men portrayed by T. S. Eliot. Their pursuit of joy has given way to their hunger for grades. Laughter and happiness are a distant memory for them.

    Although joy is an unaffordable luxury in today's increasingly fierce competition, administrators and teachers need a mindset shift from crushing students with assignments to getting them to take pleasure in productive activities which develop their important qualities, like perseverance and obligation. The assumption that pleasure is the enemy of competence and responsibility makes no sense educationally.

Adults tend to talk about learning as if it were medicine: unpleasant, but necessary and good for you. Why not think of learning as if it were food—something so valuable to humans that they want to experience it as a pleasure?

    A blog posted Dec 7, 2018 at 12:17 PM by Alanna Mallon

    Alanna Mallon is a Cambridge City Councilor.

    Each year in November, I receive a flurry of emails and texts from friends who want to volunteer with their families on Thanksgiving as a way to give back. I also field phone calls from organizations who want to donate to local programs that provide Thanksgiving meals.

    However, as an official who still works in the nonprofit sector, I also feel deeply anxious because I know the other 51 weeks of the year, these critical programs that provide food access to residents in need are starving for both volunteers and donations. Hunger is a year round problem, and each week volunteers are the necessary part to ensure that programs are able to serve the community.

    At Food For Free, we rely on about 100 volunteers per week, and each of those volunteers is extremely important to providing fresh, healthy food to people in the Greater Boston area who need it. School children who take backpacks of food home on Fridays, community college students who rely on our Family Meals program to thrive in class, elderly and disabled residents who receive twice monthly deliveries of food to their doors through our Home Delivery program, — they all rely on us ensuring enough volunteers show up to do the work.

    These volunteers don't show up in your social media feeds, they don't win awards and no one writes about them in the local newspapers. But they are heroes. And you can be too.

    If everyone made a promise to volunteer once a month, or even once a quarter, I know that we could reduce some of the anxiety these organizations feel, as a more reliable volunteer network allows them to focus on helping people, not filling volunteer slots.

    Here is a list of a few organizations who are doing critical work in Cambridge to address food insecurity. Offer your time to an organization, they will be deeply grateful—and I am going to bet that you will feel pretty good about yourself too.

Food For Free: http://foodforfree.org/volunteer.

    CEOC: http://ceoccambridge.org/food-pantry.

    Harvard Square Homeless Shelter: https://hshshelter.org/volunteer.

    Community Cooks: https://communitycooks.org/join-us.

    Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House: http://margaretfullerhouse.org