1.Growth that Starts from Thinking 在思考中成长
It seems to me a very difficult thing to put into words the beliefs we hold and what they make you do in your life. I think I was fortunate because I grew up in a family where there was a very deep religious feeling. I don’t think it was spoken of a great deal. It was more or less taken for granted that everybody held certain beliefs and needed certain reinforcements of their own strength and that that came through your belief in God and your knowledge of prayer.
我的信念是什么，它在我的人生中起到了什么作用------这些问题我觉得很难用言语解释清楚。我认为自己很幸运，因为我出生在一个笃信宗教的家庭。家里人对宗教谈论得并不多。每个人心中或多或少都有某些信仰，都希望通过某种方式获得力量，而这力量就来自信奉上帝并懂得如何祈祷。
But as I grew older I questioned a great many of the things that I knew very well my grandmother who had brought me up had taken for granted. And I think I might have been a quite difficult person to live with if it hadn’t been for the fact that my husband once said it didn’t do you any harm to learn those things, so why not let your children learn them? When they grow up they’ll think things out for themselves.
我是在祖母身边长大的。随着年龄的增长，我对许多祖母视作理所当然的事产生了怀疑。我甚至拒绝让孩子们接触这些东西，似乎成了一个不近情理的人。直到有一次我丈夫劝我，这些东西你年少时也接触过，对你也并无坏处。既然如此，何不让孩子们也有了解它们的机会呢？他们长大以后会独立思考这些问题的。
And that gave me a feeling that perhaps that’s what we all must do—think out for ourselves what we could believe and how we could live by it. And so I came to the conclusion that you had to use this life to develop the very best that you could develop.
他的话使我感到或许我们每个人都应该这样做------独立思考自己应该信仰什么以及如何在生活中坚守自己的的信仰。我认为人一生就应该尽全力做最好的自己------我想这就是我的信仰。
I don’t know whether I believe in a future life. I believe that all that you go through here must have some value, therefore there must be some reason. And there must be some “going on.” How exactly that happens I’ve never been able to decide. There is a future—that I’m sure of. But how, that I don’t know. And I came to feel that it didn’t really matter very much because whatever the future held you’d have to face it when you came to it, just as whatever life holds you have to face it exactly the same way. And the important thing was that you never let down doing the best that you were able to do—it might be poor because you might not have very much within you to give, or to help other people with, or to live your life with. But as long as you did the very best that you were able to do, then that was what you were put here to do and that was what you were accomplishing by being here.