佚名/Anonymous
A college student once told me:“I don't need to be happy—just successful.”
It's an odd juxtaposition. She needn't be happy—“just successful”. She places one in opposition to the other.
Students are today's expressions of tomorrow's practices. Their words can be the visible signs of the less visible struggles encountered by us all.
I have a memory from my own undergraduate years of a headline in my campus newspaper:“Why Aren't We Happy?”As the headline suggests, we fell short of leading joyful lives. Yet at least happiness was still on the agenda. What underlies the tendency of many of us, like my success-seeking student, to give up genuinely trying?
I've often failed to enjoy Sunday because of my schedule on Monday. At bottom, it was simply anticipatory anxiety over the work of the week ahead—fear that there would be unexpected complications or that I would fail to measure up in some way. Usually, when Monday came, I did quite well. Much of what I worried about never happened.
Joy has its own moral underpinning. There's a completeness to joy that does not allow us to exclude our sense of the person we should be. Pleasure is certainly possible in less-than-honorable actions. But the experience of joy requires more; it is pleasure taken in worthy things.
True joy requires choices that develop into habits that evolve into character. And that's work we can't delegate.
The essential first step is trying to live a less fearful life—one that avoids collapsing life's possibilities before exploring them. It entails welcoming uncertainty and comfortable incompleteness.
一个大学生曾和我说：“我不需要快乐——我只要成功。”
这是一个奇怪的思想对比。她不需要快乐——“只要成功”。她将这两者对立起来。
对学生而言，今天的言就是明天的行。他们所说的话很具有代表性，每个人都会努力奋斗，只是这种努力往往不易觉察。