“Patience” is a word that you have probably heard a lot! But you may wonder, “What on earth is patience, and why does everyone keep telling me to have it?”

    Patience is waiting for something or someone. It is accepting delay without getting angry or upset.

    ※It is waiting for someone else to speak when you have something to say !

    ※It is waiting to eat before everyone is at table !

    ※It is waiting for your birthday even though you may want a present now !

    ※Patience is trying something again when you want to give up.

    Patience doesn't sound like much fun. And to be truthful, sometimes, it's not. And with so much technology in the world, we don't always have to be patient. For example, we are able to stream our favorite TV shows on our cell phones, go to restaurants where food is served hot and fast, among many other things.

    So, why wait when we can have everything right now? Because just about any successful person has patience. Many good and important things take patience. For example, most great inventors and explorers have a lot of patience!

    ※When Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, it took him over 1,000 tries!

※It took the Wright Brothers years to invent the airplane!

    ※It takes between 150 and 300 days to travel from Earth to Mars!

    ※If great inventors did not have patience and self-control, you would not be reading this right now. In fact, you might be living in a cave or tent somewhere. You would have no electricity, no car, no school and almost certainly no Internet!

    A 525-year-old copy of a letter by Christopher Columbus, stolen from the Vatican, was returned this week. An investigation by the United States Department of Homeland Security and the Vatican located the letter.

    “We are returning it to its rightful owner, “said U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, Callista Gingrich, at a ceremony in the Vatican Library. Columbus wrote the letter to the king and queen of Spain after discovering “The New World.” He described what he had found and requested money for another trip. His original letter was written in Spanish. But several copies of a Latin translation were made to spread news of his discovery to the royal courts of Europe and the Pope.

    One of the Latin letters, copied by Stephan Plannack in 1493, was put in the Vatican Library. Known as the Columbus Letter, it has eight pages, each about 18.5 cm by 12 cm. In 2011, an American expert in rare manuscripts received a similar looking letter. After reviewing it, he decided that it was real. The year before, the same expert had studied a Columbus Letter in the Vatican Library and suspected that it was a fake. One reason was that the stitching (针脚) marks on the letter were not the same as those on the cover. The letter in the United States, however, had the exact same stitching marks as the leather cover of the fake letter he had studied in the Vatican.

    The expert, who was not identified, contacted Homeland Security art investigators, who began working with Vatican inspectors and rare book experts. They believed that someone took the real letter out of its cover at the Vatican Library and replaced it with an artificial one. Archbishop Jean-Louis Brugues is the Vatican's chief librarian. He said, “We do not know exactly when the substitution took place. We will probably never know who the forger (伪造者) was.”

    Their investigations found that Marino Massimo De Caro, a well-known Italian book thief, had sold the real letter to a New York book dealer. De Caro is serving a seven-year prison sentence in Italy for stealing about 4,000 ancient books and manuscripts from Italian libraries and private collections. The late collector David Parsons bought the letter for $875,000 in 2004. After the investigations, his widow agreed to return the letter to the Vatican Library. Officials said the letter is now worth about $1.2 million.

    Earthquakes are something that people fear. There are some places that have few or no earthquakes. Most places in the world, however, have them regularly. Countries that have a lot of earthquakes are usually quite mountainous.

    The most talked about earthquake in the United States was in San Francisco in 1906. Over 700 people died in it. The strongest one in North America was in 1964. It happened in Alaska.

    Strong earthquakes are not always the ones that kill the most people. In 1755, one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded was felt in Portugal. Around 2,000 people died.

    In 1923, a very strong earthquake hit Tokyo, Yokohama area of Japan. A hundred and forty thousand people died. Most of them died in fires which followed the earthquake.

    One of the worst earthquakes ever was in China in 2008. It killed a large number of people. The worst earthquake ever reported was also in China, in which 400,000 people were killed or injured. This earthquake happened in 1556.

    Earthquakes worry people a lot. The reason is that we often do not know when they are coming. People cannot prepare for earthquakes.

    The goings-on in the consulting room have become more transparent (透明的) recently. Thank goodness. We know more than the lines supplied by the movies in which the therapist knows all and gives wisdom to those who, sitting on a couch, consult with them. Therapists are interested in how the individual, the couple or the family experiences and understands their difficulties. That has to be a starting place. We can be of value if our first port of call is to listen, to gradually feel ourselves into the shoes of the other, to absorb the feelings that are being conveyed and to think and then to say some words.

    The thinking and talking that I do inside the consulting room is at odds with many features of ordinary conversation. Not that it is mysterious, but it isn't concerned with traditional ways of sharing or identifying. The therapist makes patterns and theorizes, but they are also reflecting on the words that are spoken, how they are delivered and how the words, once spoken, affect the speaker and the therapist themselves.

    Words can give voice to previously unknown feelings and thoughts. That's why it's called the talking cure. But just as words reveal so, too, can they obscure, and this gets us to the listening and feeling part of the therapy. Whatever and however the words are delivered, they will have an impact on me as a therapist. I might feel hopeless, I might feel energized, I might feel pushed away, I might feel demanded of, I might feel pulled to find solutions.

    The influence of the other is what makes any relationship possible or impossible. A therapist is trained to reflect on how those who consult with them affect them. As I try to step into the shoes of the other and then out again, my effort is to hold both those experiences, plus an awareness of my ease or discomfort with what I encounter in the relationship.

    Feelings are the bread and butter of our work in the consulting room. They inform or modify our ideas and they enable us to find an emotional bridge to what can so hurt for the people we are working with. Along with the more commonly thought-about theories and ideas we have about the psyche, they are an essential part of the therapist's toolkit, certainly for me. The talking cure means talking, yes. It also means the therapist is listening, thinking and feeling.

    It was only a dollar. Belscher noticed it on the floor as he sat at the back of his English class. When the school day ended, Belscher wandered back to the classroom. The old bill was still there. He could easily have pocketed it without thinking twice. Instead, he picked it up and brought it to his English teacher, Mattison.

    "It wasn't my money," Belscher says. Mattison was a little surprised he'd turned the dollar in, knowing a lot of people would have just kept it. She suggested that Belscher tape(贴) it to the whiteboard at the front of the classroom, where she always puts lost things.

    Rose, another student, was in English class after break when he spotted the dollar on the whiteboard. After class, he asked Mattison why it was there. She was still waiting for the original owner to claim it, so she replied, "I don't know." Rose took the tape from Mattison's desk and taped a second dollar to the board.

    That got it rolling. The sight of the two dollar bills, side by side, started something in Mattison's students. They started asking about the purpose of the money, to which Mattison always gave the same answer: She didn't know. At that point, it was true.

    More students, curious, taped up single dollar bills. Mattison started to leave the tape on the tray of the whiteboard. The effort snowballed. Even with no clear purpose, many students wanted to be part of whatever this was. The amount continued to grow over several weeks, until it reached $175.76.

    That left Mattison to make the best decision. She kept thinking about her brother-in-law, Jack Hains. Eight years earlier, Jack had died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a rare and devastating neurological disease(神经疾病).

    Mattison explained to her classes that Jack had raised money every spring for the ALS Therapy Development Institute, established to seek a cure for the disease. She asked the teens whether they minded if she donated the dollars in their names in honor of Jack.

    Their answer was to tape enough money to the whiteboard over the next few days to push the amount to $321.06. Mattison, choking back tears as she recalls the moment, says she carefully picked the cash off the board and made the donation just before the beginning of May, which is National ALS Awareness Month. That was Saturday. By Monday afternoon, eight more dollars had been taped to the board.

    Social media (社交媒体)is one of the fastest-growing industries in today's world. A study conducted by the US think tank (智囊团) Pew Research Center showed that 92 percent of teenagers go online daily.

    The wide spread of social media has changed nearly all parts of teenagers' lives.

    ●Changing relationships

    High school student Elly Cooper from Illinois said social media often reduces face-to-face communication.

    "It makes in-person relationships harder because people give attention to their phones instead of their boyfriends or girlfriends," Cooper said.

    There's also a greater possibility of things getting lost in translation over social media.

    "If half of your relationship is over social media, you don't really know how the other person is reacting," Sienna Schulte, a junior student from Illinois, said.

    Yet, some people believe social media has made it easier to start relationships with anyone from anywhere. Beth Kaplan from Illinois met her long-distance friend through social media. He currently lives in Scotland, but they're still able to frequently communicate with one another.

    "I can feel close to someone that I'm talking to via (通过) FaceTime," Kaplan said.

    ●Wanting to be "liked"

    The rise of social media has changed the way teenagers see themselves.

    The 19-year-old Essena O'Neill announced on the social networking service Instagram that she was quitting social media because it made her obsessed (痴迷) with appearing perfect online.

    Negative comments also can do great damage to a teenager's self-esteem (自尊).

    In particular, anonymous (匿名的) social media apps such as Yik Yak may provide opportunities for cyberbullying (网络欺凌).

    The app allows users within 5 miles (8 km) to create and add comments to everything. Teenagers who get negative comments on these sites can't help but feel hurt.

    ●Opening new doors

    However, Armin Korsos, a student from Illinois, takes advantage of the comments he receives over social media to improve his videos on the social networking site YouTube.

    "Social media can help people show themselves and their talents to the world in a way that was never possible before," Korsos said.

    But Korsos recognizes that social media has become a distraction.

    "Social media, though it helps people connect with their friends and stay updated, is not all necessary."