I was living a life in my screen and hardly noticed what was around me. So when my friends invited me to go camping for a long weekend without the cell service, I thought this was exactly what I needed. Here's how keeping away from my phone for 48 hours changed me.

    I realized my bedtime routine was usually centered on one thing: my phone. Right before I went to sleep, I browsed through news websites and checked my emails. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I did the same thing. The problem with this was I felt anxious every night. I felt free without my phone at that weekend camp. I felt asleep listening to the sound of crickets.

    When I had my phone, I was always checking the time and thinking of future plans. My thought was: “Who's going to text me now? What will I do next?” Without my phone, I truly savored what I was doing in the moment, sitting by the river, riding a bike, or singing the old songs. There was no need to rush through any of it. I listened to what my body wanted instead of what my phone was telling me to do.

    You know that moment when you're hanging out with a group of people and no one has anything to say? The typical response: Everyone immediately pulls out their phones. So what did we do without a phone to avoid embarrassing silences? We actually talked to each other. Instead of burying our faces in our screens, we looked one another in the eye, had a moment of pure human connection and then continued talking. And you know what? People actually listened.

    So, now what? Now I'm back to the real world.

    Most people have flown a kite or have seen one ride and dip in strong spring wind. Not so many people know that kites were first made in China thousands of years ago. The ancient Chinese were making and flying kites even before they were writing.

    A long time ago, the Chinese made kites to use in wars. They would fly these war kites in the dark. The kites were fixed so that they made strange sounds. Men who were at war with them would hear these sounds and run away. They thought those strange sounds were made by gods in the sky.

    The ancient Chinese also flew kites to bring good luck and to make their crops grow rich and tall. Sometimes they tied long strings and hooks to their kites. Then they would fly the kites over water, letting the hooks hang down to catch fish.

    The Chinese use sticks, strings and paper for their kites. Some of these kites look like animals or trees. Others look like birds or houses.

    Attention from strangers is nothing new to me. Questions about my height is the center of almost every public interaction. My friends say my height is just a physical quality and not a personality aspect. However, when I reflect on my life, I realize that my height has shaped my character in many ways and has helped to make me who I am.

    I learned how to be kind. When I was younger, some parents in my neighborhood regarded me kind of dangerous because I was so much larger than other children of my age. I had to be extra welcoming and gentle simply to play with other children. Of course, now my coaches wish I weren't quite so kind on the basketball court.

    I learned the quality of not being too proud about myself. At 7 feet tall, everyone expects me to be an amazing basketball player. They come expecting to see Dirk Nowitzki, and instead they might see a performance more like Will Ferrell (successfully starred a professional basketball player). I have learned to be modest and to work even harder than my fellows to meet their (and my) expectations.

    I developed a sense of lightheartedness. When people playfully make fun of my height, I laugh at myself too. On my first day of high school, a girl dropped her books in a busy hallway. I got down to her level and gathered some of her notebooks. As we both stood up, her eyes widened as I kept rising over her. Astonished, she dropped her books again. Embarrassed, we both laughed and picked up the books a second time.

    All of these lessons have defined me. Looking back, I realize that through years of such experiences, I have become a confident, expressive person. Being a 7-footer is both a blessing and a curse (诅咒), but in the end, accepting who you are is the first step to happiness.

    My wife, daughter, and I moved into our home nine years ago and we spent a lot of time and energy in the yard to get it looking like the way it does today. We live on a corner, higher than street level, and the entire side of the yard is surrounded by a professionally built rock wall. The front of the house though is another story because instead of a wall along the sidewalk, the rocks appear to be just thrown up onto the dirt as if someone were in a hurry to finish.

    We did the best we could with what we had to work with and called this area our "rock garden". Whenever we had leftover flowers or plants, Denise or I would stick them out front, just to bring some color to the area. We would do all of the yard work on our own, even the tiring weed-pulling.

    Last summer I had reached the end of the rock garden and found a tiny little plant that I could not immediately identify, I knew I didn't plant it and Denise claimed that she didn't either. We decided to let it continue growing until we could figure out what it was.

    Weeks passed and as I made my way back to the mystery plant, it appeared to be a Sunflower with a tall skinny stalk（茎，杆）and only one head on it. I decided to baby it along and weed around it. As I pulled rocks from the area to get to the weeds, I noticed something unusual. The Sunflower had not started where I saw the stalk begin. It actually had begun under a big rock and grown under and around it to reach the sun.

    That's when I realized that if a tiny little Sunflower didn't let a big rock stand in its way of developing, we too have the ability of doing the same thing. Once our environment begins to see that we believe in ourselves like that little Sunflower, we can attain the same nourishment（营养）and growth as well.

    Stand tall like the Sunflower and be proud of who and what you are and the environment will begin to support you. You will find a way to go under or around your big obstacle in order to reach your desires.

    BOXTEL, Netherlands — chickens roam the orchards, cows chew the cud and pigs roll in the mud on a warm day on a Dutch farm ——but the pastoral (乡村)scene is not as traditional as it seems.

    The farm is owned and run by a cooperative of hundreds of local consumers and aims to change habits in a low-lying country engaged in an existential fight against climate change. Nearly 200 families decide what the farm will produce — and they will eventually eat — and employ a farmer to tend to the animals for meat and eggs and grow the dozen kinds of fruits and vegetables.

    "The main aim of the members is to eat natural products, produced near to where they live, in a more sustainable (可持续的)way," said Douwe Korting, co-leader of the Boxtel Cooperative, in the southern Netherlands. People are really starting to see that a change toward a different way of eating is essential," he added.

    It costs 2,000 euros ($2,200) to join the collective (集体的)farm, which is 10 minutes by bicycle from the town, and then a weekly fee of around 10 euros per person.

    In return, members receive the food they want and stress the importance of knowing what they eat is local and seasonal.

    Known as Herenboderderij, or People's Farming, the guiding principle is that everything centers on the needs and riches of nature, even while using new technologies, " said its founder Geert van der Veer. Soon the poultry (家禽) will be joined by a robot that can sense when the fruit is ripe, as well as a drone that will survey the fields to support and reduce the needs for manpower.