One of the greatest sources of unhappiness, in my experience, is the difficulty we have in accepting things as they are.

    When we see something we don't like, we wish it could be different. We cry out for something better. That may be human nature, or perhaps it's something ingrained(根深蒂固的) in our culture. The root of the unhappiness isn't necessarily that we want things to be different. However, it's that we decided we didn't like it in the first place. We've judged it as bad, rather than saying, "It's not bad or good, and it just is it."

    In one of my books, I said "You should expect people to mess up and expect things to go differently than you planned". Some readers said it's too sorrowful to expect things to go wrong. However, it's only negative if you see it as negative and judge it as bad. Instead, you could accept it as the way the world works and try to understand why that is.

    This can be applied to whatever you do: how other people act at work, how politics works and how depressing the news media can be. Accept these things as they are, and try to understand why they're that way. It will save you a lot of sadness, because you'll no longer say, "Oh. I wish bad things didn't happen!"

    Does it mean you can never change things? Not at all. But change things not because you can't accept things as they are, but because you enjoy the process of changing, learning and growing.

    Can we make this world a better place? You can say that you'll continue to try to do things to help others, to grow as a person, to make a difference in this world. That's the correct path you choose to take, because you enjoy that path. Therefore, when you find yourself judging and wishing for difference, try a different approach: accept, and understand. It might lead to some interesting results.

    “Don't tell anyone”. We hear these words when someone tells a secret to us. But it can be hard to keep a secret. We5re often tempted to “spill the beans"，even if we regret it later.

    According to Asim Shah, professor in the Menninger Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine, US, keeping a secret may well "become a burden”. This is because people often have an “obsessive and anxious urge to share it with someone”.

    An earlier study, led by Anita E. Kelly, a scientist at the University of Notre Dame, US, suggested that keeping a secret could cause stress. People entrusted (受委托的)with secrets can suffer from depression, anxiety, and body aches, reported the Daily Mail.

    But with secrets so often getting out, why do people share them at all? Shah explained that people often feel that it will help them keep a person as a friend. Another reason people share secrets is guilt over keeping it from someone close to them. A sense of distrust can develop when people who are close do not share it with each other. "Keeping or sharing secrets often puts people in a position of either gaining or losing the trust of someone,” according to Shah.

    He added that talkative people could let secrets slip out (泄露). But this doesn't mean that it is a good idea only to share secrets with quiet people. A quiet person may be someone who keeps everything inside. To tell such a person a secret may cause them stress, and make them talk about the secret.

    Shah said that to judge whether to tell someone a secret, you'd better put yourself in their position. Think about how you would feel to be told that you mustn't give the information away. Shah also recommended that if you accidentally give up someone's secret you should come clean about it. Let the person know that their secret isn't so secret anymore.

Baths in Japan

    In many western countries people do not bathe (沐浴) every day. Sometimes they bathe only once a week. Sometimes they bathe two or three times a week. They do not bathe often because the weather is cold or because hot water is expensive. They use electricity or wood to boil the water. Electricity and wood cost a lot of money. In cold countries people usually do not feel they are dirty if they do not have a bath.

    In Japan people bathe very often. Most people have a bath every day. When the weather is hot they sometimes have two or three baths a day. They bathe in very hot water. Usually the water is almost boiling. They believe that these very hot baths also stop them from falling ill.

    Each house has its own bathroom but there are also big bathhouses for everybody. They are found everywhere in Japan. In the bathhouse there is one part for men and one part for women. The bath is usually three meters wide, three meters long and about one meter deep: halfway down there is a narrow (狭窄的) seat that goes all the way around the bath. Many people use the bath but it is not dirty. Before a person gets into the big bath, they wash themselves first, and then get into the big bath. The person stays there for a short time. When they get out of the bath, they wash their body with soap and water. After the soap is all washed away, the person gets into the big bath again. Soap is not used in the big bath.

    The water in the big bath is changed quite often. The water is also very hot. In some places people hit the water with sticks first. They do this to make the water cooler. Then the men get into the bath very slowly and carefully. When a man gets into a bath, he says. "Excuse me." He does this because most of the hot water comes directly out of the ground. In other places people boil the water with a big fire. In a small bath at home sometimes people light a fire under the bath. When the water is hot, people in the family take a bath one by one.

Rich as a King

    William 1, who conquered England some 930 years ago, had wealth, power and an army. Yet although William was very rich by the standard of his time, he had nothing like a flush toilet (抽水马桶), paper towels, or riding lawn mower (除草机). How did he get by?

    History books are filled with wealthy people who were poor compared to me. I have storm windows, Croesus did not. Entire nations trembled before Alexander the Great, but he couldn't buy cat food. Czar Nicholas lacked an electric saw.

    Given how much better off I am than so many famous dead people, you'd think I'd be content. The trouble is that, like most people, I compare my wealth with that of living person: neighbors, school classmates, famous TV people. The greed I feel toward my friend Howard's new kitchen is not reduced by the fact that no kings ever had a refrigerator with glass doors,

    There is really no rising or falling standard of living. Over the centuries people simply find different things to feel sad about. You'd think that simply not having disease would put us in a good mood, but no we want a hot bath too.

    Of course, one way to achieve happiness would be to realize that even by today's standards the things I own are pretty nice. My house is smaller than the houses of many investment bankers, but even so it has a lot more rooms than my wife and I can keep clean.

    Besides, to people looking back at our era from a century or two in the future, these bankers' fancy counter tops and my awn worn Formica will seem equally shabby, I can't keep up with my neighbors right now. But just wait.

    Babies have an astonishing talent that adults entirely lose. By the age of one, they can recognise the significant noises around them and group them into a language. When we have lost this capacity as adults, it becomes enormously difficult to distinguish between sounds that are glaringly different to a native speaker. It all sounds Greek to us. This is because the range of possible sounds that humans use to convey meaning may be as high as 2,000, but few languages use more than 100 and even then the significant noises－the phonemes (音素) of a language－each cover a range of sounds and so vague distinctions which would change the meaning of a word in other languages.

    But where do these phonemes come from and why do they shift over time? New research suggests that the apparently arbitrary distribution of some sounds around the world may be partially explained by diet. This is unexpected. We'd rather think of language as product of our thought  rather than of the arrangement of our teeth. In reality, though, any given language must be both.

    Hunter gatherer languages very seldom use the sounds known as labiodentals (唇齿音)－those such as f and v－that are made by touching the lower lip with the upper teeth. Only two of the hundreds of Australian aboriginal languages use them, for example. But in cultures that have discovered farming, these consonants (辅音) are much more common. The argument goes that farmers eat more cooked food and more dairy than hunter gatherers. Either way, they need to chew mush less, and to bite less with their front teeth. So farmers grew up with smaller lower jaws and more of an overbite than their ancestors who had to bite through harder foods. It became easier for them to make the labiodental consonants instead of purely labial (唇音) ones: one example is that f come to take the place of p. Romans said "pater" but English speakers (unless they're Rees－Moggs) say "father".

    Beyond these particular changes, the story highlights the way in which everything distinctively human is both material and spiritual: speech must combine sound and meaning, and the meaning can't exist or be transmitted without a real object. But neither can it be reduced to the purely physical, as our inability to understand or even to recognise foreign languages makes clear. The food we eat shapes our jaws, and our jaws in turn shape the sounds of our language. The ease with which we eat probably shapes our thought too, as anyone who has suffered toothache could testify. What we eat may have shaped the sounds of our language, but how we eat changes how we feel and what we use language to express. A family meal is very different from a sandwich at the office desk, even if the calorie is the same. Food has purposes and meanings far beyond keeping us alive and pleasing the Palate (味觉).

    Being deaf in a hearing world can lead to painful feelings of isolation (孤独).

    Waitress Kelsey recently shared an experience on a social media sharing site that quickly zoomed (陡直上升) to the top of the" front page of the Internet". In her brief post, Kelsey explained that she waits tables at a bar during the evenings, and one night she noticed a deaf man sitting alone in her section (区域).

    When Kelsey isn't working at the bar she makes a good hourly pay doing sign language interpretation (翻译), so she sensed an opportunity to use her skill to make this customer feel a little less alone in the world. She approached his table and began chatting with him in sign language.

    When the table next to his noticed their silent conversation they asked Kelsey how long she'd been signing. They had a brief conversation about her goal of becoming certified (合格的) to interpret sign language in a medical or mental health setting. She didn't think much about the whole exchange until the customers had left the restaurant and she was tidying up the tables. There, on the table of the customers who'd seen her American sign language conversation with the deaf man, was a handwritten note on the receipt.

    "Thank you for what you do; it absolutely matters!" the note said. "Good luck with finishing your degree!" Not only that, but they'd left her a $100 tip.

    Kelsey was moved by the kind note, especially because she wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary. To her, she was just conversing with someone in a language that only they understood. Yet to the deaf man and the people seated next to him she'd bridged a gap and helped someone who probably feels lonely a lot of the time.

    Kelsey shared the note on the Internet to spread more love and light in the world.