I still remember my first day at school in London and I was half-excited and half-frightened. On my way to school I wondered what sort of questions the other boys would ask me and practiced all the answers: “I am nine years old. I was born here but I haven't lived here since I was two. I was living in Farley. It's about thirty miles away. I came back to London two months ago.” I also wondered if it was the custom for boys to fight strangers like me, but I was tall for my age. I hoped they would decide not to risk it.

    No one took any notice of me before school. I stood in the center of the playground, expecting someone to say “hello”, but no one spoke to me. When a teacher called my name and told me where my classroom was, one or two boys looked at me but that was all.

    My teacher was called Mr. Jones. There were 42 boys in the class, so I didn't stand out there, either, until the first lesson of the afternoon. Mr. Jones was very fond of Charles Dickens and he had decided to read aloud to us from David Copperfield, but first he asked several boys if they knew Dickens' birthplace, but no one guessed right. A boy called Brian, the biggest in the class, said: “Timbuktu”, and Mr. Jones went red in the face. Then he asked me. I said: “Portsmouth”, and everyone stared at me because Mr. Jones said I was right. This didn't make me very popular, of course.

    “He thinks he's clever,” I heard Brian say.

    After that, we went out to the playground to play football. I was in Brian's team, and he obviously had Dickens in mind because he told me to go in goal. No one ever wanted to be the goalkeeper.

    “He's big enough and useless enough.” Brian said when someone asked him why he had chosen me.

    I suppose Mr. Jones, who served as the judge, remembered Dickens, too, because when the game was nearly over, Brian pushed one of the players on the other team, and he gave them a penalty (惩罚). As the boy kicked the ball to my right, I threw myself down instinctively (本能地) and saved it. All my team crowded round me. My bare knees were injured and bleeding. Brian took out a handkerchief and offered it to me.

    “Do you want to join my gang (帮派)?” he said. At the end of the day, I was no longer a stranger.

    Yesterday night, over a dinner with my elder brother's family, a topic of happiness came up. My wife, Marla, a psychologist, was sharing Csikszentmihalyi's concept of “flow” with us. Marla explained that according to the research on flow, people are happiest when they are absorbed in a task that is just challenging enough for them to experience a sense of mastery(熟练).

    A few moments later my brother, Yuri, offered the following opinion: “The first and only, necessary and sufficient factor for happiness is to stop associating happiness with pleasure. The two — happiness and pleasure — have nothing to do with each other.” This morning, with my cup of coffee, I searched through a pile of books on my bedside table and—at the bottom—found a book by Bertrand Russell, I started reading but didn't finish. In it, I found the following thought:

    “The human animal, like others, is adapted to a certain amount of struggle for life, and when by means of great wealth homo sapiens can gratify all his whims (突发奇想) without effort, the mere absence of effort from his life removes an essential ingredient of happiness.”

    The conversation came full circle: people are happiest when they are in a state of flow (Csikszentmihalyi's language )…which is the effortful devotion in a moment…which has nothing to do with pleasure.

    Indeed, as Yuri insisted : happiness–as–pleasure is a myth; the association between happiness and pleasure is nothing but a semantic(语义的) habit; psychologically, the two—happiness and pleasure—are arguably different; and breaking up this association between pleasure and happiness might, in fact, be a powerfully first step in pursuit of happiness.

    As I look back on that exchange, I recall that there was an effort, a struggle to find a common understanding about this seemingly difficult idea—a struggle that made me happy.

    I was with a group of businessmen, and we were dealing with a question — what is a good person?

    At a certain point during the discussion, one of the students, a young man of about 30, described an event that happened at Christmas. He and his five-year-old son were decorating the Christmas tree, and a little boy came to the front door begging. If you ever visit Mexico, you will see that the people there take begging as nothing to get upset about and nothing to get embarrassed by.

    So, this little boy came to the door, a boy about the same age as my student's son. The father and the son went to the front door, and the father went back with his five-year-old son and said to him, “Give him one of your toys.” At the words, the little boy quickly picked up one toy, and his father said to him, “No, no, give him your favorite toy.”

    And the little boy, like a little tiger, said, “No way!” He cried; he refused. But the father, like a big tiger in a way, insisted gently, “No, you must give him one of your favorite toys.”

    And finally the boy, with his head down, picked up a toy he had just gotten. The father waited in the living room, and the boy walked to the front door with the toy in his hand. The father waited and waited.

    What do you think happened?

    After a couple of minutes, his son came running back into the living room, his face lighted up. “Daddy,” he said, “can I do that again?” I think I have got the answer to the question.

    The lives of the Ancient Greeks revolved(运转) around Eris, a concept by which they defined the universe. They believed that the world existed in a condition of opposites. If there was good, then there was evil； if there was love, then there was hatred; joy, then sorrow; war, then peace; and so on. The Greeks believed that good Eris occurred when one held a balanced outlook on life and coped with problems as they arose. It was a kind of ease of living that came from trying to bring together the great opposing forces in nature. Bad Eris was evident in the violent conditions that ruled men's lives. Although these things were found in nature and sometimes could not be controlled, it was believed that bad Eris occurred when one ignored a problem, letting it grow larger until it destroyed not only that person, but his family as well. The Ancient Greeks saw Eris as a goddess: Eris, the Goddess of Discord, better known as Trouble.

    One myth that expresses this concept of bad Eris deals with the marriage of King Peleus and the river goddess Thetis. Zeus, the supreme ruler, learns that Thetis would bear a child strong enough to destroy its father. Not wanting to father his own ruin, Zeus convinces Thetis to marry a human, a mortal(凡人) whose child could never challenge the gods. He promises her, among other things, the greatest wedding in all of Heaven and Earth and allows the couple to invite whomever they please. This is one of the first mixed marriages of Greek Mythology and the lesson learned from it still applies today. They do invite everyone . . . except Eris, the Goddess of Discord. In other words, instead of facing the problems brought on by a mixed marriage, they turn their backs on them. They refused to deal directly with their problems and the result is tragic. In her fury(狂怒), Eris arrives, ruins the wedding, causes a jealous argument between the three major goddesses over a golden apple, and sets in place the conditions that lead to the Trojan War. The war would take place 20 years in the future, but it would result in the death of the only child of the bride and groom, Achilles. Eris would destroy the parents' hopes for their future, leaving the couple with no legal heirs (继承人) to the throne.

    Hence, when we are told, “If you don't invite trouble, trouble comes,” it means that if we don't deal with our problems, our problems will deal with us .with a revenge! It is easy to see why the Greeks considered many of their myths learning myths, for this one teaches us the best way to defeat that which can destroy us.

    One time a young man, who hoped to study law, wrote to Lincoln for advice, and Lincoln replied, "If you are determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already. Always bear in mind that your own determination to succeed is more important than any other one thing."

    Lincoln knew. He had gone through it all. He had never, in his entire life, had more than a total of one year's schooling. And books？Lincoln once said he had walked to borrow every book with in fifty miles of his home. A fire was usually kept going all night in the small house and he read by the light of it.

    He walked twenty or thirty miles to hear a speaker and, returning home, he practiced his talks everywhere﹣in the fields, in the woods, before the crowds. He joined several societies and practiced speaking on the topics of the day.

    A lack of confidence always troubled him. In the presence of women he was shy and dumb. Even when he was in love with Mary Todd, he used to sit there, nervous and silent, unable to find words, listening while she did the talking. Yet that was the man who, by practice and home study, made himself into the speaker who debated with the famous speaker Douglas! That was the man who, in Gettysburg address, rose to the heights of eloquence （雄辩） that have seldom been achieved in all the human history.

    Small wonder that, speaking of his own great barriers and painful struggle, he wrote, "If you are determined to make a lawyer of yourself, the thing is more than half done already."

    Oxford and Cambridge have now decided to remove the words CAN'T and IMPOSSIBLE from their dictionary. Jessica Cox, 25, a girl born without arms, stands inside an aircraft. The girl from Tucson, Arizona got the Sport Pilot certificate lately and became the first pilot licensed to fly using only her feet. Jessica Cox of Tucson was born without arms, but that has only stopped her from doing one thing: using the word "can't".

    Her latest flight into the seemingly impossible is becoming the first pilot licensed to fly using only her feet.

    With one foot manning the controls and the other delicately guiding the steering column, Cox, 25, soared to achieve a Sport Pilot certificate. Her certificate qualifies her to fly a light-sport aircraft to altitudes of 10,000 feet.

    "She's a good pilot. She's rock solid," said Parrish Traweek, 42, the flying instructor at San Manuel's Ray Blair Airport. Parrish Traweek runs PC Aircraft Maintenance and Flight Services and has trained many pilots, some of whom didn't come close to Cox's abilities.

    "When she came up here driving a car," Traweek recalled, "I knew she'd have no problem flying a plane."

    Doctors never learned why she was born without arms, but she figured out early on that she didn't want to use prosthetic devices. So, the next time you are ready to tell yourself, "I can't possibly..." remember this amazing young woman and change your vocabulary.