A Ball to Roll Around

奚兆霞

原文

I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a freight (運貨) yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I am thirty瞭wo. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what red color is. It would be wonderful to see ゛gain, but a calamity (災(zāi)難) can do strange things to people.

It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn餿 been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, otherwise. I don餿 mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had left.

Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was bewildered (困惑的，不知所措) and ゛fraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me—a potential to live, you might call it—which I didn餿 see, and they made me want to fight it out with blindness.

The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If I hadn餿 been able to do that, I would have collapsed and become a chair rocker on the front porch (門廊) for the rest of my life. When I say belief in myself I am not talking about simply the kind of self瞔onfidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is part of it. But I mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person that somewhere in the sweeping, intricate (復雜難解的) pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit.

It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball, I thought he was mocking (譏笑，嘲笑) me and I was hurt. “I can餿 use this,” I said. “Take it with you,” he urged me, “and roll it around.” The words stuck in my head. “Roll it around!” By rolling the ball I could hear where it went. This gave me an idea how to achieve a goal I had thought impossible: playing baseball. At Philadelphia餾 Overbrook School for the Blind I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it ground ball.

All my life I have set ahead of is a series of goals and then tried to reach them, one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good to try for something I knew at the start was wildly out of reach because that only invited the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway but on the average I made progress.

譯文

滾 球

4歲那年在大西洋城，我從貨場一輛火車上摔下來，頭先著地，于是雙目失明?，F(xiàn)在我已經(jīng)32歲了。我還模糊地記得陽光是多么燦爛，紅色是多么鮮艷。能恢復視覺固然好，但災(zāi)難也能對人產(chǎn)生奇妙的作用。

有一天我突然想到，倘若我不是盲人，我或許不會變得像現(xiàn)在這樣熱愛生活。現(xiàn)在我相信生活，但我不能肯定如果自己是明眼人，會不會像現(xiàn)在這樣深深地相信生活。這并不意味著我寧愿成為盲人，而只是意味著失去視力使我更加珍惜自己其他的能力。

我認為，生活要求人不斷地自我調(diào)整以適應(yīng)現(xiàn)實。人愈能及時地進行調(diào)整，他的個人世界便愈有意義。調(diào)整決非易事。我曾感到茫然害怕，但我很幸

運，父母和老師在我身上發(fā)現(xiàn)了某種東西——可以稱之為活下去的潛力吧——而我自己卻沒有發(fā)現(xiàn)。他們激勵我誓與失明拼搏到底。

我必須學會的最艱難的一課就是相信自己，這是基本條件。如做不到這一點，我的精神就會崩潰，只能坐在前門廊的搖椅中度過余生。相信自己并不僅僅指支持我獨自走下陌生的樓梯的那種自信，那是一部分。我指的是大事：是堅信自己雖然有缺陷，卻是一個真正的有進取心的人；堅信在蕓蕓眾生錯綜復雜的格局當中，自有我可以安身立命的一席之地。

我花了很長時間才樹立并不斷加強這一信念。這要從最簡單的事做起。有一次一個人給我一個室內(nèi)玩的棒球，我以為他在嘲笑我，心里很難受?！拔也荒苁惯@個?！蔽艺f。“你拿去，”他竭力勸我，“在地上滾?！彼脑捲谖夷X子里生了根?！霸诘厣蠞L！”滾球使我聽見它朝哪兒滾動。我馬上想到一個我曾認為不可能達到的目標：打棒球。在費城的奧弗布魯克盲人學校，我發(fā)明了一種很受人歡迎的棒球游戲，我們稱它為地面球。

我這一輩子給自己樹立了一系列目標，然后努力去達到，一次一個。我必須了解自己能力有限，若開始就知道某個目標根本達不到卻硬要去實現(xiàn)，那不會有任何好處，因為那只會帶來失敗的苦果。我有時也失敗過，但一般來說總有進步。

推薦理由：人生最艱難的事就是相信自己，對于高三學習有困難的學生更是如此。這則故事的主人公讓同學們在緊張的學習中懂得相信自己是多么的重要。