Foreword
前言
Chapter 1 The Joy of Giving
第一部分 给予的快乐
01. A Deed a Day
日行一善 003
02. It’s What We Do
这是我们的使命 009
03. A Friend in Need
患难之友 017
04. Always Something to Give
总有能付出的东西 024
05. New York City’s Greatest Underground Secret
纽约地下的大秘密 031
06. Just One Loaf
一个面包 038
07. It Was Nothing
这没什么 045
08. Feeling Better, Bag by Bag
一包一包，越来越好 051
09. Finding My Mantra
找到我的祷语 056
Chapter 2 Finding My Purpose
第二部分 找到生活的目的
10. I Don’t Quit
我永不言弃 067
11. Filling a Need
满足需求 075
12. Finding Me
找到自己 080
13. A Ride on a Carousel
旋转木马 085
14. Too Dumb to Be a Nurse
太笨了，当不了护士 091
15. Hugs, Hope, and Peanut Butter
拥抱，希望，花生酱 099
16. Listening to My Heart
听从内心的呼唤 106
17. You Go Girl!
姐姐加油！ 112
18. Reclaiming Myself
重拾自己 119
19. My Detour to Destiny
绕道回归命运 125
Chapter 3 Simple Pleasures
第三部分 简单的快乐
20. The Small Things
一些小事 135
21. The No-Share Zone
独享区 140
22. Treasure Hunting
寻宝游戏 145
23. The Returning Light
光芒重现 150
24. Everyday Miracles
每天都有奇迹 154
25. A Remodeled View
焕然一新的风景 162
26. A Perfect Ten
完美的10 码 167
27. Pockets of Happiness
装在口袋里的幸福 173
28. Authentic Happiness
真正的幸福 181
29. Sometimes Bliss Is a Place
有时候幸福是个地方 186
Chapter 4 Making the Best of It
第四部分 随遇而安
30. From Illness Comes Strength
疾病给人力量 197
31. Seeing My Purpose
看到我的目标 205
32. Here I Stand
我站在这里 213
33. Listening to My Inner Passion
听从我内心的激情 218
34. How I Talked My Way to Happiness
我是怎样通过聊天找到幸福的 224
35. A New Best Friend
新交的好朋友 229
36. Peter Pan
彼得潘 235
37. No Longer Waiting for Godot
不再等待戈多 243
38. The Girls on the Bus
公交车上的女士们 250
39. The Palm Tree
棕榈树 256
Chapter 5 Jumping off the Hamster Wheel
第五部分 跳下仓鼠滚轮
40. What If You Won the Lottery
要是你中奖呢 267
41. New Rewards
新的回报 273
42. Rewriting My Future
重新书写我的未来 278
43. Last Call
最后的晚宴 286
44. When I Grow Up I Will Be a Professor
长大以后我要当个老师 292
45. I Chose Love
我选择爱 301
46. A Paltry Price for Personal Peace
微小代价换来平和心灵 307
47. What Do You Do?
我是做哪一行的？ 315
48. Ripe for a Change
做好准备，迎接改变 322
49. My Secret Love Affair
我的秘密情史 330
50. A Final Word
写在最后的话 336
Meet Our Contributors
见见我们的投稿者 342
Meet Our Authors
见见我们的作者 360
About Deborah Norville
黛波拉诺维尔简介 364
Thank You
感谢词 366
Improving Your Life Every Day
每天改善你的生活 370
Share with Us
与我们一同分享 371
內容試閱：
Sometimes Bliss Is a Place
有时候幸福是个地方
You can fall in love at first sight with a place as with a person.
—Alec Waugh
I’ve always been something of a wanderer. I’ve lived in a lot of different places, most of them interesting… but none of them permanent. Of course, unlike other sensible wanderers, I’ve also accumulated artifacts of my interesting homes, mostly in the form of books.
Books, as even the most casual observer would agree, make moving around a little more of a daunting proposition. Well, that’s true, at least for normal, sane people. Not for me, however, which says something about my sanity: I accumulate books the way other people accumulate postcards, and I’ve always been undaunted by my library. The inevitable result is that I know more about packing and carrying cartons of books than do most moving professionals. Put them in storage? Surely you’re not serious! Mybooks are my friends, creased and underlined and marked up, read and re-read and quoted and shared. Where I go, they go.
So I spent years moving about and happily experiencing various lives and loves and accumulating wisdom, experience… and more books. And while every place I lived touched me in some way, I always left when it felt like it was time to leave.
Minor digression: the English author Phil Rickman, one of my favorite people in the world, writes amazing suspense novels that are guaranteed to keep you up late at night—I highly recommend them—but one of the things that’s the most noticeable in his books is their venues. The landscape, the place, is as much a character in his stories as are any of the people.
I love reading about the places he describes, about those remote places he makes accessible to me, and I’ve always felt instantly connected to the places he writes about; but at the end of the day I couldn’t particularly relate to them.
And so I packed my Phil Rickman books with the rest of my library and moved again. And again.
And then I went to spend a winter in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Provincetown is truly land’s end—it’s at the tip of Cape Cod, and it feels like the tip of the world. It’s the first place that the Pilgrims landed, well before
Plymouth, and the last place one reaches before the Atlantic Ocean… beyond it, there’s nothing but waves and whales before Portugal. It’s not a place that people come by accident; no one “happened” to stop there as they were passing through, because it’s not a place that’s on the way anywhere else.
People, I learned, go to Provincetown deliberately: to heal, to find love, to find peace, to find themselves. People go there to live and they go there to die. But no one is there accidentally.
Provincetown is at the edge of land, the edge of the sea, the edge of the world. And there I went, thinking that I was going to a quiet place to spend the winter, an isolated wild place to write. Nothing more than that.
Almost magically, my first morning there, I innocently tuned my stereo to the local community radio station and heard Dave Carter’s song “Gentle Arms of Eden” and after that I went down to walk out on the pier and by the harbor and… well, the reality is that something happened.
Perhaps I merged the lyrics of the song I’d just heard—words that talked about this being my home, my only home, sacred ground that I’d be walking on—and perhaps I integrated Phil Rickman’s sense of place, which so permeated my consciousness, but suddenly I was enveloped by an incredible warmth, an amazing sense of being exactly where I should be. And—this was new for me—not just “where I should be right now,” but, rather, “where I should be. Period.”
As the days passed, the feeling intensified, and with it a sense of wellbeing that I had never experienced before. This was where I belonged, where I fit in, just like a missing piece to a puzzle.
I got involved in the community, met people, made friends. I walked the beach in the vilest weather, my coat wrapped tightly around me, the sand stinging my face, and I never felt so alive. I sat in my aerie and wrote and wrote and wrote… finishing the novel I’d originally gone there to write, and letting more projects flow and fall into place… a short story, an article, essays, poems… it was as though the place had unlocked everything that was real and vital and creative inside me.
And after months and months of living there—after years and years of wandering—I finally put down roots and bought a house. An old sea captain’shouse, built in 1835, where I finally built the library of my dreams, floorto- ceiling shelves filled with my friends, filled with stories and tales and information that fed my life and imagination.
And as I settled in, suddenly I understood Phil Rickman’s portrayal of place as a character in a story, for I felt that I was entering into a relationship with this place. Every day I woke up and was immediately aware of where I was, enjoying the sun shining through my windows and illuminating the myriad spines of books on my shelves, and realizing that within ten minutes I could be walking on a beach on the ocean side of the Cape.
And I fell in love.
So many people attach their bliss to falling in love with a person. That is the fairytale mentality of western civilization, but that’s not what happened to me: I became happy once I fell in love with this place.
The world—the wide world that I’d spent most of my life exploring— suddenly became focused on one place. All my life, I’d been looking for something, and I never knew what it was… and then, suddenly, I seemed to have found it, without ever having articulated—even to myself—what I was looking for.
And yet I finally found happiness in this place. Every morning I wake up and smile, because I live in paradise and get to spend my day doing exactly what I love doing. I start my days early, with a walk on the beach where I watch the sun rise, no matter what the weather is: I love the ocean in the calm summer months as well as in the wild winter ones. The sun up, I go back to my wonderful house where I eat and drink and start writing. In summer months, I watch the bees from my hives fly out on their mission to pollinate the vineyard next to where I live; in winter, I look out over undisturbed snow and stillness and beauty. And no matter what the season, it all encompasses me in its embrace: this is where I belong. As those long-ago words from Dave Carter’s song told me, this is sacred ground.
I’ve found my happiness, my bliss. I was raised to believe that I would find it in another person, and that has not happened; but I have found it in a place, my home, my very being.
And that’s not such a bad thing after all.
—Jeannette de Beauvoir
你可以像对人一见钟情一样对一个地方一见倾心。
——亚力克沃
我一直居无定所。我在很多地方生活过，很多地方都很有趣……但是我从未定居。当然，我和其他周游四方的理性之人不太一样，我会收集居住过的每个地方的工艺品，绝大多数是书。
即使最粗心的观察者也会同意，书籍让周游四方变得没那么容易。这没错，至少对理智的正常人来说是这样。但对我却并非如此，这也就说明我没那么理智：我像别人收集明信片一样收集书籍，面对我的图书馆，我向来毫无惧色。如此一来，我理所当然要比其他游走专业户更明白怎样打包，以及怎么带走一箱又一箱的书籍。把它们放在仓库里？你肯定在开玩笑！书是我的朋友，上面满是折痕、画线还有我做的标记，被我反复阅读、时常引用并与人分享。我去哪儿，书就得去哪儿。
于是，很多年来，我一直四处搬家，幸福地体验各种生活和热爱，积累智慧和经验……还有越来越多的书。我生活过的每一个地方都以某种方式感动了我，但当我感到时机到了，我该走了的时候，我还是会离开。
略微跑一下题：我最喜欢的一位英国作家菲尔里克曼写了很多精彩的悬疑小说，读他的小说肯定能让你熬到深夜——我强烈推荐——但是他的书中最引人注目的当数他描写的地点。那里的景色、场景也和人物一样，是故事中的角色。
我很喜欢读他描写的地点，他让我仿佛置身那遥不可及的地方，我也一直感觉立刻就能融入其中，但是我又不会对某个地方格外感兴趣。于是我又收拾起菲尔里克曼的书，和我的小图书馆一起又搬了家。然后再搬家。
后来，我去马萨诸塞州的普罗温斯敦住了一冬天。
普罗温斯敦是真正的大陆一角——它位于科德角一端，似乎也像是世界的一端了。这是清教徒在普利茅斯前登陆的第一个地方，也是进入大西洋前人们能涉足的最后一个地方……出了这里，在抵达葡萄牙之前，除了海浪和鲸鱼外什么都没有。这不是人们会偶然到达的地方，没有人会“偶然”在这里歇脚，因为出了这里不会再有远方。
我发现，来到普罗温斯顿的人都是有意为之：来这里疗养、寻找伴侣、找到内心的宁静、找到自己。人们来到这里生活，也来到这里死去。但没有一个人是偶然来到这里。
普罗温斯顿处于天之涯，海之边，也是世界的一角。我也去了那里，心想可以在这个安静的地方过冬，也
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