It was my first day back home since starting college. A lot had changed in the last year. Not with my hometown but with me. I had left as a 17-year-old boy and had now returned as an 18-year-old man. In the city, I was living on my own, had a part-time job and was studying. Even the government recognized I was an adult: I had a driver's license. So here I was, on my summer vacation, walking down the main street with my father, desperate for him to acknowledge how mature I was. When his recognition failed to appear, I took matters into my own hands. “Dad,” I said casually, “I'm thirsty. Let's go for a beer.” It was the first time I'd ever mentioned beer in front of my father, let alone ask him to drink one with me.

    He turned to me with a curious expression on his face. “A beer? Well, 1 guess you're old enough now. Let's go to Sailors' Bar. It's where my cousin Tom, your uncle, used to drink. You remember him, right?”

    I had only some vague recollection of my uncle. He was the black sheep of the family. We didn't talk about him much. What ever happened to Uncle Tom, Dad? I haven't seen him in years,” I said as we continued towards the bar.

     “Neither have I, unfortunately. He was a good kid once. But things changed,” my father said mournfully. As a boy, he explained, there had been no better-behaved boy than Tom. But after leaving school, he moved to the city and fell in with bad company. He started going out every night, drinking in nightclubs and playing cards. Soon he lost everything and had to beg his mum to pay his debts. She agreed on condition that he returned home.

    My dad took a deep breath and continued his tale. "Things settled down for a while. He married a lovely woman, gave up his bad habits. But it didn't last. He was soon back to his old ways. He couldn't resist. He was at Sailors, Bar almost every night. His poor mother died of grief and shame. His wife followed her soon after.

     “What ruined him was alcohol He told me once, when a man begins drinking, he never knows where it'll end. ‘So', Tom warned me. ‘be cautious about your first drink!'

     “He went from bad to worse. Last year Tom sent me a letter saying he had been found guilty of stealing, and sent to prison for ten years.”

    Dad finished talking just as we reached the front door of Sailors' Bar. “Anyway, here we are. Let's go in,” he said. But understood. I put my arm around my father and said, “I'm not thirsty anymore, Dad. Let's go home.”

    I was very fortunate to be selected by Kindspring to receive $100 for the monthly kindness competition and it has helped to make a beautiful difference in people's lives.

    The idea is simple. I took a lot of fallen branches and hung them from the ceiling with the help of volunteers and friends. Then we hung strings with pins attached to them from the branches. I got a whole lot of art supplies and as people came in for the art exhibit, they were encouraged to create a piece of art or a positive message to hang from the tree.

    The tree changed into this really fun way of exchanging positive messages. If you were to hang a message up, you had to take a message down for you to keep. The experience was really amazing. People of all ages and from all walks of life were sharing art and encouragement through the tree.

    With the $100 I received from Kindspring, I made a total of seven more trees. I am putting them all over our community（社区）. One will go to a youth shelter for homeless teens and one will be put right in the middle of town on our public square. They will have paper and art supplies at the base for people to use in creating a message or piece of art. For the classroom I was able to provide them with new colored pencils, markers, and some sketchbooks, which they all loved. The act is to create communications that are positive and can influence people's lives in great ways just by doing a simple act of kindness. The messages people receive can be kept with them forever as a reminder of the good in the world, or they can pass them along to others. The beauty of the idea is that the messages have unlimited possibilities.

    Technology offers conveniences such as opening the garage door from your car or changing the television station without touching the TV.

    Now one American company is offering its employees a new convenience: a microchip implanted (植入) in their hands. Employees who have these chips can do all kinds of things just by waving their hands. Three Square Market is offering to implant microchips in all of their employees for free. Each chip costs $300 and Three Square Market will pay for the chip. Employees can volunteer to have the chips implanted in their hands. About 50 out of 80 employees have chosen to do so. The president of the company, his wife and their children are also getting chips implanted in their hands.

    The chip is about the size of a grain of rice. Implanting the chip only takes about a second and is said to hurt only very briefly. The chips go under the skin between the thumb and forefinger. With a chip in the hand, a person can enter the office building, buy food, sign into computers and more, simply by waving that hand near a scanner. The chips will be also used to identify employees. Employees who want convenience, but do not want to have a microchip implanted under their skin, can wear a wristband (腕带) or a ring with a chip instead. They can perform the same tasks with a wave of their hands as if they had an implanted chip.

    Three Square Market is the first company in the United States to offer to implant chips in its employees. Epicenter, a company in Sweden, has been implanting chips in its employees for a while.

    Three Square Market says the chip cannot track the employees. The company says scanners can read the chips only when they are within a few inches of them. “The chips protect against identity theft, similar, to credit cards.” The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the chips back in 2004, so they should be safe for humans, according to the company.

    In the future, people with the chips may be able to do more with them, even outside the office. Todd Westby is Chief Executive Officer of Three Square Market. He says, “Eventually, this technology will become standardized allowing you to use this as your passport, public transit, all purchasing opportunities, etc.”

    Most of us feel very tired after working for eight hours a day, five days a week. When we get home, we watch at least one film because it's well-deserved and the only time we get to "relax" before going to sleep. Wake up and repeat. No wonder you feel tired. So how do you get out of this vicious circle? How do you restart your life?

    ⒈YOUR MINDSET

    "Oh man, another one of these self-improvement things. I hope I can do it, but I've tried these things before, and I just never stick to it."

    This was something I used to say to myself every time I try to start something new for myself. There's a fear-driven side of your brain which tells you, "You can't do this."

    What can you do? Well, the tip here is to talk to yourself like you're talking to a friend, or a coworker. So the next time you try something new, be kind to yourself like you would be kind to others. You are your own worst critic. But you can also be your firm defender.

    ⒉YOUR DIET

    If you are looking at what you eat for the reason to feel energized, then the general rules are:

    1) Eat when you're hungry. Don't eat when you're not.

    2) Be mindful when you eat. Chew at least 20 times. Let yourself taste and digest your food.

    3) Don't do three things at once when you're eating. Your body wasn't made for that.

    4) Preferably, eat "real" food. Eat what your great-grandmother would recognize as food.

    Don't let your days pass by in a boring way. Start by re-examining these key habits in your life to build a body that can start doing things you want.

    ⒊YOUR SLEEP

    Without enough sleep, we're basically going through the day drunk. This means tiredness, difficulty to respond quickly and smartly to anything that comes up. The sleeping hours needed for an average adult ranges from 7 to 9 hours.

What a Messy Desk Says About You

    For some time, psychologists have been studying how personality traits affect health and health-related choices. Not surprisingly, they have found that people blessed with innate conscientiousness, meaning that they are organized and predictable, typically eat better and live longer than people who are disorderly. They also tend to have immaculate offices.

    What has been less clear is whether neat environments can produce good habits even in those who aren't necessarily innately conscientious. To find out, researchers at the University of Minnesota conducted a series of experiments. In the first experiment, they randomly assigned a group of college-age students to spend time in two office spaces, one of which was very neat, the other wildly cluttered (乱堆) with papers and other work-related stuff. The students spent their time filling out questionnaires unrelated to the study. After 10 minutes, they were told they could leave with an apple or a chocolate bar. Those students who sat in the orderly office were twice as likely to choose the apple as those who sat among the mess.

    A second experiment, however, found that working in chaos has its advantages, too. In this one, college students were placed in a messy or a neat office and asked to dream up new uses for Ping-Pong balls. Those in messy spaces generated ideas that were significantly more creative, according to two independent judges, than those in offices where stacks of papers and other objects were neatly arranged.

    The results were something of a surprise, says Dr. Vohs, the leader of the study. Few previous studies found much virtue in disorder. The broken window theory, proposed decades ago, holds that even slight disorder and neglect can encourage indifference and poor discipline.

    But in the study by Dr. Vohs, disordered offices encouraged originality and a search for novelty. In the final portion of the study, adults were given the choice of adding a health "boost" to their lunchtime smoothie that was labeled either "new" or "classic." The volunteers in the messy space were far more likely to choose the new one; those in the tidy office generally chose the classic version. "Disorderly environments seem to inspire breaking free of tradition," Dr. Vohs and her co-authors conclude in the study, "which can produce fresh insights."

    The implications of these findings are also practical. "My advice would be, if you need to think outside the box for a future project", Dr. Vohs says, "then let the clutter rise and free your imagination. But if your primary goal is to eat well or to go to the gym, pick up around your office first. By doing this, the naturally messy can acquire some of the discipline of the conscientious."

In 2019, Thierry Henry, a bus driver, found there was a rise in bike thefts in his city, Reykjavik. Rather than 1 that the bike was gone forever, he decided to take matters into his own hands and started to track down the bikes and return them to their 2 owners. 

The 44-year-old has helped return hundreds of stolen bikes in the past 4 years. His social media account has over 14, 500 members and helps people track down more than just lost bikes. His page 3 to people who have lost tools, cars and other items of high value. On top of his noble act, Henry has helped the bike 4 to reform in the process. 

5 , Henry would deal with the thieves with anger. However, over time, he realized that most of the thefts were driven out of poverty and other issues. He went from feeling 6 towards the thieves, to developing empathy （同理心） for their situations. It was very tough at first. But Henry decided to try to 7 them and just talk to them. 

From this moment onward, he reached out to the thieves, offering help and guidance. After the change in his 8 , Henry found that the bike thieves began to often hand back the bikes to him. Amazingly, some former thieves that Henry helped now 9 him in looking for the stolen bikes. 

"It's like a 10 that has got bigger and bigger, ". says Henry. "It's not only me. Many times, someone spots a bike hidden in a bush and takes a picture. Then someone else comments, 'hey, that's my bike'. "

Thanks to Henry, everyone's looking out.