Mr. Black was a wealthy businessman, but he was not 1 with life. He did not sleep well and his food did not 2with him. The situation lasted for some time. Final­ly, after a  3of sleepless nights, he 4to see his doctor. The doctor ad­vised a change of  5  "Go abroad," he said. "But I'm not good at foreign languages," said Mr. Black. "It doesn't matter," said the doctor. "It won't 6 you to talk a little less. 7 on a trip. Take plenty of exercise. Try to8 your weight. Avoid (避免) eating rich food. " Mr. Black went to Switzerland. He did not know French or Ger­man, and had to 9  himself through gestures. He attended a physical training course. The instructor（指导者） 10 him bend his knees, swing his arms, stretch his neck and shake his  11.He had to lie on the ground and  12  his right and left legs in 13.  After a time his muscles grew hard and firm. He almost14 aside his financial(金融的) worries and nearly forgot the importance of 15 more money. He even began to  16individual trees and individual birds.  He ate and slept well. 17 he returned home.  But unfortunately his18 did not19 long. Soon he was a normal businessman again, worried about his property, his profits, his savings, his success in a competitive society, and things in20.

    I often go to France to visit my grandmother who is very dear to me. She's now 76 years old, so every time I go to1 the two of us are very aware that it might be the2time we see each other for she has cancer.

    Last time I visited her in December of 2012. I did a series of short video3about her life. I asked her about her greatest memories and life learning so far, her 4books, food and stories. I learned a large quantity of amazing new things about her I5knew before.

    This year, I did not really have 6 only a great urge for her to know how much she is loved. I cooked for her and read her stories.

    Before leaving, I was7a way to leave something8behind besides the memory of our 9together. So I wrote her five different 10and gratitude notes to let her know how much she11to me, and hid them in different places where I knew she would 12find them. One under her pillow. Another one 13from the lamp cover by which she reads in the evening. Another one by her toothbrush. One in her14which she eagerly checks every day. And the last one on her car's steering wheel.

    I left 15knowing that these cards would surely 16her up after I left. She called me as I was departing for Paris to catch my plane back to the US and said, “I17your three cards! By the time I discovered the third card, I was laughing out loud!18 they did me so much good. Thank you so much!” I19to myself, knowing she still has two more to go! It was Sunday, so my 20was that she had not checked her mailbox and had not yet driven her car!

    I walked into a bank in town a couple of days ago and waited in the queue. I was the second1and I couldn't help overhearing the2in front of me. The bank clerk must have been having a(an)3 day and after asking how the4was and so on, he began to complain about our government, 5them for not doing enough to6the coast from storms and floods as this had been much on the news at the time.

    He was in7spirits and you could tell that he was really8about a lot of things going on in the world.

    My heart went out to him. I was 9 next and all I could do was10. 1didn't have any words. Afterwards, it 11to me something that had been running under my own thoughts.

    So I left the bank, found a12and on it I wrote: Sometimes the bad parts of the world seem so13. There are so many sad things going on in the news. They make it hard to see 14going on around us. But that doesn't15life right now can't be beautiful. All you have to do is open your eyes. It's in the gaps(缝隙) that beauty is16.

    I17the postcard back into the bank, wandered around and18 it on a table, 19that the bank clerk would find it. Whether he did or not, I never found out, but it20would do someone some good, which I'm certain of.

A Commitment to Life

    The snow was falling and the roads had become dangerous. The schools were dismissed early, but much to my surprise, my 1 wasn't canceled. So I went, feeling especially heroic. As far as I could see, I was risking my life to keep my 2. Snow or no snow, I would be on time for my scheduled donation at the local 3 center.

    When I got there, I discovered I wasn't 4. Four more “hero-types” were already lying back in donor chairs with lines 5 to their veins(静脉), and machines quietly pumping away to 6 their lifesaving gifts.

    Seeing my fellow donors honoring their own commitments, I realized why I was there. I lay back in my donor chair, ready to make a 7 to the life of someone I would never 8.

    To be honest, I'd never really thought about why I donate. I just did it. 9 a few months ago, during one of my 10 donations I learned that my blood was specifically for a cancer patient and for a newborn baby—both patients needed what I would give in order to live. I've viewed my visits to the blood center 11 ever since.

    My wife Karen is a 12, too. And more importantly, she has been on the bone marrow (骨髓) list for fifteen years, ever since she 13 to provide bone marrow to a kindergartner with leukemia(白血病). That little girl died before Karen's bone marrow could help her, but Karen was called again recently. Her test results were still on file, and it turned out she was a potential 14 for someone else. The caller asked Karen if she would still be willing to become a bone marrow donor. “Yes,” she said and then immediately began answering questions on the pages of paperwork for further testing. It was a race 15 time.

    I wish I could say that this 16 was won. It wasn't. The caller later thanked Karen for her participation and asked a few more questions—including whether or not she'd 17on the donor list. “Of course,” Karen answered.

    Last week Karen gave blood and next week I'll make my usual donation. I'll clear an afternoon from my schedule and make an appointment. I don't know whose life my donation may 18. Most likely it will be a 19, but on any day the person needing blood could be you or me or maybe a loved one. It is worthwhile to 20our time to donate.

    I really do feel proud every time I donate. And I like the feeling.

At my first lesson in Chinese calligraphy, my teacher told me plainly: "Now I will teach you how to write your name. And to make it beautiful." I felt my breath catch. I was curious.

Growing up in Singapore, I had an unusual relationship with my Chinese name. My parents are ethnically Chinese, so they asked fortune tellers to decide my name, aiming for maximum luck. As a result, I ended up with a nonsense and embarrassing name: Chen Yiwen, meaning, roughly, "old", "barley （薏米） "and "warm".

When I arrived in America for college at 18, I put on an American accent and abandoned my Chinese name. When I moved to Hong Kong in 2021, after 14 years in the States, I decided to learn calligraphy. Why not get back in touch with my heritage? I thought.

In calligraphy, the idea is to copy the old masters' techniques, thereby refining your own. Every week, though, my teacher would give uncomfortably on-the-nose assessments of my person. "You need to be braver," he once observed. "Have confidence. Try to produce a bold stroke （笔画）." For years, I had prided myself on presenting an image of confidence, but my writing betrayed me.

I was trying to make sense of this practice. You must visualize the word as it is to be written and leave a trace of yourself in it. As a bodily practice, calligraphy could go beyond its own cultural restrictions. Could it help me go beyond mine? My teacher once said to me, "When you look at the word, you see the body. Though a word on the page is two-dimensional, it contains multitudes, conveying the force you've applied, the energy of your grip, the arch of your spine." I had been learning calligraphy to get in touch with my cultural roots, but what I was really seeking was a return to myself. Now I have sensed that the pleasure out of calligraphy allows me to know myself more fully.

During a recent lesson, my teacher pointed at the word I had just finished, telling me: "This word is much better. I can see the choices you made, your calculations, your flow. Trust yourself. This word is yours." He might as well have said, "This word is you."

We all know how it feels to get lost in a great book. But what's happening in our brains as we dive into it? How is it different from what happens as we experience real life? Now, a new study led by Dr Leila Wehbe and Dr Tom Mitehell of Carnegie Mellon University have provided partial answers to these questions. 

Since reading comprehension is a highly complex process, earlier studies tried to break that process down and focus on just one aspect at a time: mapping fMRI signatures（特征）associated with processing a single word or sentence, for example. "It's usually not like reading a book, and usually the stimulus（刺激物）consists of out-of-context sentences designed specifically for the experiment"

To address these issues, the researchers developed a computer program to look for patterns of brain activity that appeared when people read certain words, specific grammatical structures, particular characters" names and other aspects of the story—a total of 195 different "story features". In the study, they first asked eight volunteers to read Chapter 9 of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and recorded their brain activity using an fMRI scanner（扫描仪）. Then the researchers fed the volunteers' fMRI data into their computer program and had the program identify the responses of different brain regions to the 195 features mentioned above. 

The result showed that when the volunteers read descriptions of physical movement in the story, there was significantly increased activity in the posterior temporal cortex, the region involved in perceiving real-world movement. Besides dialogue was specifically related with the right temporoparietal junction, a key area involved in imagining others thoughts and goals. "This is truly shocking for us as these regions aren't even considered to be part of the brain's language system," Wehbe says. 

Next, Wehbe and Mitchell hope to study how and why language processing can go wrong. "If we have a large enough amount of data", Wehbe says, "we could find the specific ways in which one brain—for example, the brain of a dyslexic（诵读困难的）person—is performing differently from other brains." And this, the researchers think, may someday help us design individually tailored（特制的）treatments for dyslexia and other reading disorders.