关于励志的英语散文
1.Life, free to soar
by Wayne B.Lynn
One windy spring day, I observed young people having fun using the wind to fly their kites.Multicolored creations of varying shapes and sizes filled the skies like beautiful birds darting anddancing. As the strong winds gusted against the kites, a string kept them in check.
Instead of blowing away with the wind, they arose against it to achieve great heights. Theyshook and pulled, but the restraining string and the cumbersome tail kept them in tow,facing upward and against the wind. As the kites struggled and kept them in tow, facingupward and against the wind. As the kites struggled and trembled against the string, theyseemed to say,” Let me go! Let me go! I want to be free!” they soared beautifully even as theyfought the restriction of the string. Finally, one of the kites succeeded in breaking loose. “Freeat last,” it seemed to say. “Free to fly with the wind.”
Yet freedom from restraint simply put it at the mercy of an unsympathetic breeze. Itfluttered ungracefully to the ground and landed in a tangled mass of weeds and string againsta dead bush. ”Free at last”, free to lie powerless in the dirt, to be blown helplessly along theground, and to lodge lifeless against the first obstruction.
How much like kites we sometimes are. The heaven gives us adversity and restrictions, rules tofollow from which we can grow and gain strength. Restraint is a necessary counterpart to thewinds of opposition. Some of us tug at the rules so hard that we never soar to reach theheights we might have obtained. We keep part of the commandment and never rise highenough to get our tails off the ground.
Let us each rise to the great heights, recognizing that some of the restraints that we may chafeunder are actually the steadying force that helps us ascend and achieve.
自由的代价
在一个有风的春日，我看到一群年轻人正在迎风放风筝玩乐，各种颜色、各种形状和大小的风筝就好像美丽的鸟儿在空中飞舞。当强风把风筝吹起，牵引线就能够控制它们。
风筝迎风飘向更高的地方，而不是随风而去。它们摇摆着、拉扯着，但牵引线以及笨重的尾巴使它们处于控制之中，并且迎风而上。它们挣扎着、抖动着想要挣脱线的束缚，仿佛在说：“放开我!放开我!我想要自由!”即使与牵引线奋争着，它们依然在美丽地飞翔。终于，一只风筝成功挣脱了。“终于自由了，”它好像在说，“终于可以随风自由飞翔了!”
然而，脱离束缚的自由使它完全处于无情微风的摆布下。它毫无风度地震颤着向地面坠落，落在一堆乱草之中，线缠绕在一颗死灌木上。“终于自由”使它自由到无力地躺在尘土中，无助地任风沿着地面将其吹走，碰到第一个障碍物便毫无生命地滞留在那里了。
有时我们真像这风筝啊!上苍赋予我们困境和约束，赋予我们成长和增强实力所要遵从的规则。约束是逆风的必要匹配物。我们中有些人是如此强硬地抵制规则，以至我们从来无法飞到本来能够达到的高度。我们只遵从部分戒律，因此永远不会飞得足够高，使尾巴远离地面。
让我们每个人都飞到高处吧，并且认识到这一点：有些可能会令我们生气的约束，实际上是帮助我们攀升和实现愿望的平衡。
2.A New Look from Borrowed Time
By Ralph Richmond
Just ten years ago, I sat across the desk from a doctor with a stethoscope. “Yes,” he said, “there is a lesion in the left, upper lobe. You have a moderately advanced case…” I listened, stunned, as he continued, “You’ll have to give up work at once and go to bed. Later on, we’ll see.” He gave no assurances.
Feeling like a man who in mid-career has suddenly been placed under sentence of death with an indefinite reprieve, I left the doctor’s office, walked over to the park, and sat down on a bench, perhaps, as I then told myself, for the last time. I needed to think. In the next three days, I cleared up my affairs; then I went home, got into bed, and set my watch to tick off not the minutes, but the months. 2 ½ years and many dashed hopes later, I left my bed and began the long climb back. It was another year before I made it.
I speak of this experience because these years that past so slowly taught me what to value and what to believe. They said to me: Take time, before time takes you. I realize now that this world I’m living in is not my oyster to be opened but my opportunity to be grasped. Each day, to me, is a precious entity. The sun comes up and presents me with 24 brand new, wonderful hours—not to pass, but to fill.
I’ve learned to appreciate those little, all-important things I never thought I had the time to notice before: the play of light on running water, the music of the wind in my favorite pine tree. I seem now to see and hear and feel with some of the recovered freshness of childhood. How well, for instance, I recall the touch of the springy earth under my feet the day I first stepped upon it after the years in bed. It was almost more than I could bear. It was like regaining one’s citizenship in a world one had nearly lost.
Frequently, I sit back and say to myself, Let me make note of this moment I’m living right now, because in it I’m well, happy, hard at work doing what I like best to do. It won’t always be like this, so while it is I’ll make the most of it—and afterwards, I remember—and be grateful. All this, I owe to that long time spent on the sidelines of life. Wiser people come to this awareness without having to acquire it the hard way. But I wasn’t wise enough. I’m wiser now, a little, and happier.
“Look thy last on all things lovely, every hour.” With these words, Walter de la Mare sums up for me my philosophy and my belief. God made this world—in spite of what man now and then tries to do to unmake it—a dwelling place of beauty and wonder, and He filled it with more goodness than most of us suspect. And so I say to myself, Should I not pretty often take time to absorb the beauty and the wonder, to contribute a least a little to the goodness? And should I not then, in my heart, give thanks? Truly, I do. This I believe.
第二次生命的启示
拉尔夫.里士满
十年前的一天，我坐在一名手持听诊器的医生对面。“你的左肺叶上部确实有一处坏损，而且病情正在恶化”——听到这里，我整个人一下懵了。“你必须停止工作卧床休息，有待观察。”医生对我的病情也是不置可否。
就这样，事业方面方兴未艾的我仿佛突然被人判了死刑，却说不准何时执刑。我离开医生的办公室，来到公园的长椅上坐下。这也许是最后一次来这儿了，我对自己说。我真得好好整理一下思绪。
接下来的三天我把手头的事务全部处理完毕。我回到家，躺到床上，然后把手表从显示分钟改为显示月份。
两年半的时间过去了，在无数次的失望之后，我终于可以离开病床，艰难地向从前的生活状态回归。一年之后，我做到了。
我之所以谈起这段经历，是因为那段度日如年的岁月让我懂得应该珍惜什么，信仰什么。那段岁月让我明白一个道理：牢牢抓住时间，而不是让时间将你套牢。
现在我终于明白，我生活着的这个世界不是等待我去打开的一扇牡蛎，而是需要我去抓住的一个机会。每一天我都视若珍宝，每一轮太阳带给我的崭新的二十四小时都鲜活而精彩，我绝不可将其虚度。
从前，我终日忙碌，无暇顾及生活中某些重要的细节，诸如水波上的光影，松林间的风吟——现在，我终于学会去欣赏它们的美好。
如今，我仿佛重返童年，又觉得自己所见所闻所感的一切都那么新鲜。当我卧床数年后重新将双脚踏在大地上的那一刻，脚下那久违了的松软土壤让我激动得情难自抑，仿佛重新拥有我差一点就失去的世界。
我现在时常舒舒服服地坐着，提醒自己要记住当下的每分每秒，因为现在的我健康、快乐，能努力做自己最爱做的工作。这一切如此美好，却终将消逝，在如此美好的生活消逝之前，我一定要倍加珍惜。在它逝去之后，我会记得曾经拥有的美好，并心存感激。
这一切改变都得益于我在生命边缘徘徊的那几年。智者无需被逼到如此境地也能明白这些道理——可惜我从前太愚钝。现在的我比从前多了几分睿智，我也因此更加快乐。
英国诗人沃尔特·德拉·梅尔曾说过：“时刻记住，最后看一眼所有美好的事物!”这句诗正好总结了我的人生哲学与信仰。上帝创造的这个世界——这个人类时常试图毁灭的世界——是个美丽奇妙的家园。这里充满了上帝所赐予的美好事物，超过我们大多数人的想象。我于是常常自问，难道自己不应该去细细品味这些美丽与奇迹，尽绵薄之力去创造世间的美好吗?难道我不应心存感激吗?我确实应该——这就是我的信仰。
3.I Wish I Could believe
by C. Day Lewis
"The best lack all conviction,
While the worst are full of passionate intesity."
Those two lines of Yeats for me sum up the matter as it stands today when the very currency of belief seems debased. I was brought up in the Christian church. Later I believed for a while that communism offered the best hope for this world. I acknowledge the need for belief, but I cannot forget how through the ages great faiths have been vitiated by fanaticism and dogmatism, by intolerance and cruelty, by the intellectual dishonesty, the folly, the crankiness or the opportunism of their adherents.
Have I no faith at all, then? Faith is the thing at the core of you, the sediment that's left when hopes and illusions are drained away. The thing for which you make any sacrifice because without it you would be nothing - a mere walking shadow. I know what my own core is. I would in the last resort sacrifice any human relationship, any way of living to the search for truth which produces my poem. I know there are heavy odds against any poem I write surviving after my death. I realize that writing poetry may seem the most preposterously useless thing a man can be doing today. Yet it is just at such times of crisis that each man discovers or rediscovers what he values most. My poet's instinct to make something comes out most strongly then, enabling me to use fear, doubt, even despair as creative stimuli. In doing so, I feel my kinship with humanity, with the common man who carries on doing his job till the bomb falls or the sea closes over him. Carries on because of his belief, however inarticulate, that this is the best thing he can do.
But the poet is luckier than the layman, for his job is always a vacation. Indeed, it's so like a religious vacation that he may feel little need for a religious faith, but because it is always trying to get past the trivial and the transient or to reveal these as images of the essential and the permanent, poetry is at least a kind of spiritual activity.
Men need a religious belief to make sense out of life. I wish I had such a belief myself, but any creed of mine would be honeycombed with confusions and reservations. Yet when I write a poem I am trying to make sense out of life. And just now and then my experience composes and transmutes itself into a poem which tells me something I didn't know I knew.
So for me the compulsion of poetry is the sign of a belief, not the less real for being unformulated ... a belief that men must enjoy life, explore life, enhance life. Each as best he can. And that I shall do these things best through the practice of poetry.
我希望我能相信
塞(西尔)·戴·刘易斯
“优秀的人们信心尽失，
坏蛋们则充满了炽烈的狂热。”
对我来说，叶芝的这两行诗概括了今天的现实，信仰的货币似乎已经贬值了。我是在__的熏陶下长大的。后来有一段时间我相信共产主义给这个世界带来了最大的希望。我承认信仰的必要性，但我无法忘记历代的伟大信仰是如何因其拥护者的狂热、教条、褊狭、残忍、学术欺诈、愚蠢、偏执或机会主义而遭到损害的。
那么，难道我就没有信仰吗?信仰存在于你的心灵深处，当希望和幻想渐渐枯竭，沉淀下来的就是信仰。为了它，你甘愿做出任何牺牲，因为没有它，你的存在就毫无意义——你只不过是一个会行走的影子。我知道我的内心深处有什么。在别无选择的情况下，我愿意牺牲任何人际关系、任何生活方式去寻找使我能创作诗歌的真理。我知道很有可能我写的每一首诗在我死后都不能流传。我也明白诗歌创作在今天或许是一个人所能做的最荒谬、最无用的事情。然而，正是在这样的危难之时，每一个人才能发现或重新发现他最珍视的东西。于是我那诗人渴望创作的本能在胸中涌动，使我能让恐惧、怀疑，甚至绝望激发自己创作。在诗歌创作中，我觉得我和人类，和平凡的人紧密相连，他们坚守着自己的岗位，直到炸弹落下或是海浪席卷而来将他们淹没。坚守是因为他相信这是他最能做的事情，尽管这信仰难以用语言传达。但诗人比普通人幸运，因为他的工作始终是他的天职。他就像肩负着一种宗教使命一样，或许并不需要有宗教信仰，但因为诗歌或是不涉及琐事和瞬息即逝的事物，或是将它们作为本质和永恒的意象，诗歌至少是一种精神活动。
人需要有一种宗教信仰使他的生活有意义。我希望我也能有这样的信仰，但我的任何信念总会充满困惑和保留看法。然而，我写诗就是努力发掘生活的意义。偶尔，我用诗歌表现自己的经历和感受，从中也明白了我不曾意识到自己已经懂得的道理。因此，对我来说，诗歌创作的冲动表现出来的，不是因为不系统而不太真实的东西……而是一种信仰，那就是，人必须享受生活，探索生活的真谛，提高生活的品质。人可各尽其能，而我则通过写诗尽善尽美地完成我的使命。
