激情晨读英语美文 第二章 从一粒沙看世界:人生的两条真理

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Chapter Two  To See a World in a Grain of Sand
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
——William Blake

Two Truths to Live by
By Alexander M. Schindler
The art of living is to know when to hold fast
and when to let go. For life is a paradox:
it enjoins us to cling to its many gifts
even while it ordains their eventual relinquishment.
The rabbis of old put it this way: “A man comes to
this world with his fist clenched, but when he dies,
his hand is open.”Surely we ought to hold fast
to life, for it is wondrous, and full of a beauty
that breaks through every pore of God’s own earth.
We know that this is so, but all too often we
recognize this truth only in our backward glance
when we remember what it was and then suddenly
realize that it is no more.We remember
a beauty that faded, a love that waned.
But we remember with far greater pain that
we did not see that beauty when it flowered,
that we failed to respond with love when
it was tendered.A recent experience re-taught me
this truth. I was hospitalized following a
severe heart attack and had been in intensive care
for several days. It was not a pleasant place.
One morning, I had to have some additional tests.
The required machines were located in a building
at the opposite end of the hospital, so I
had to be wheeled across the courtyard on a gurney.
As we emerged from our unit, the sunlight hit me.
That’s all there was to my experience. Just the light
of the sun, and yet how beautiful it was — how warming,
how sparkling, how brilliant!I looked to see
whether anyone else relished the sun’s golden glow,
but everyone was hurrying to and fro, most with eyes
fixed on the ground. Then I remembered how often I,
too, had been indifferent to the grandeur of each day,
too preoccupied with petty and sometimes even mean
concerns to respond to the splendor of it all.
The insight gleaned from that experience is really
as commonplace as was the experience itself:
life’s gifts are precious — but we are
too heedless of them.Here then is the first pole
of life’s paradoxical demands on us:
Never too busy for the wonder and the awe of life.
Be reverent before each dawning day.
Embrace hour. Seize each golden minute.
Hold fast to life, but not so fast that
you cannot let go. This is the second side of
life’s coin, the opposite pole of its paradox:
we must accept our losses, and learn how to let go.