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Years ago, when I started looking for my first job, wise advisers said,“Barbara, be enthusiastic!Enthusiasm will take your further than any amount of experience.”How right they were!
“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm,”wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson.It is the paste that helps you hang on there when the going gets tough.It is the inner voice that whispers,“I can do it!”when others shout,“No, you can't!”It took years and years for the early work of Barbara McClintock, a geneticist who won the 1983 Nobel Prize in medicine, to be generally accepted.Yet she didn't let up on her experiments.Work was such a deep pressure for her that she never thought of stopping.
We are all born with wide-eyed, enthusiastic wonder and it is this childlike wonder that gives enthusiastic people such youthful air, whatever their age.At 90, cellist(大提琴家)Pablo Casals would start his day by playing Bach(巴赫).As the music flowed through his fingers, his bend shoulders would strengthen and joy would reappear in his eyes.As author and poet Samuel once wrote,“Yeas make the skin old, but to give up enthusiasm makes the soul old.”
Enthusiastic people also love what they do, regardless of money, title or power.Patricia Mcllrath, retired director of the Missouri Repertory Theater in Kansas City, was once asked where she got her enthusiasm.She replied, “My father, a lawyer, long ago told me, I never made a penny until I stopped working for money.”
If we can't do what we love as a full-time career, we can do it as a hobby.Elizabeth Layton of Wellsville, Kan, was 68 before she began to draw.This activity ended her sadness that had troubled her for at least 30 years, and the quality of her work led one critic(评论家)to say,“I am persuaded to call Layton a genius.”
We can't afford to waste tears on“might-have-beens”.We need to turn the tears into sweat as we go after“what-can-be”.We need to live each moment whole-heartedly, with all our senses-finding pleasure in the sweet smell of a backyard garden, the simple picture of a six-year-old, and the beauty of a rainbow.
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