I am amazed by how fast I can calm myself down, after informing my most beloved person. Yes that helps. That helps take away the control of Sadness on my mind, and hand the panel to Fear, Anger and Disgust, to the exact suitable extent. Joy slyly takes a little bit handle, telling me what possible stuff I could still do. Thing goes badly, but that is just not the worst.
Yet, I still wish I can gain full access to the entire Curse Word Library.
Every day will be a big pile of bullshit if I focus on only problems I have come across.
- That suddenly-broken-down external hard disk.
- Those never-replying and always-busy kids.
- Things that I do not enjoy but have to do.
- Things that others do not enjoy but I have to make them do.
Many many of them if I have to recount every piece of them.
But life is not the summation of every problem, they say. Or at least, that is not the meaning of life. The meaning of life is the summation of every tiny little event that makes ones happy.
- The hard disk worked again with no apparent reasons.
- The introvert kid finally dared to phone me (because I came late lol).
- The same introvert kid shared with me his experience last week.
- The patrol leader frankly and boldly told me his and his patrol's thoughts.
- Some scouts that I taught in Astronomy course still remember me and called me Fan Sir.
- One of them asked for more posts on the Astro Club Facebook page.
- Girl scout from QCOBASS feeling proud when coming across Scout and Scouter from QC.
- She shared her pride on Facebook and we became friends.
- A very big glass of iced lemon tea.
- Having meals with my family.
- Listened to George Lam in TVB.
- Having a group of enthusiastic scouters to share my frustration with.
- Still alive.
- And you. My irreplaceably lovable girlfriend.
Recollect those small things. It is always something small that build something big. And, look at them. What more can I ask for?
Since the universe is a big place, we could easily get lost. So, we will need signposts to give us a sense of scale. The acrobat ring is 1 meter wide, the crowd is 10 times wider, 10 meters across, larger by one power of ten. Now, with every step, every ring, we travel 10 times farther from Venice, and our view of the universe is 10 times wider.
The 100-metre ring is around St. Marks, and 1,000 metres, 1 kilometer, the city centre. As our speed increases, 4 steps – 4 powers of 10 – reveal all the islands of Venice, the Adriatic Sea, and the mainland in Northern Italy.
If we visualize the paths that the nine (note: eight) planets take in their orbits around the Sun at 13 steps from St. Mark’s Square, the entire solar system comes into view.
And with 15 steps – 15 powers of 10 – we can see our sun is just another star. From here on, our voyage will be measured in light-years – the distance light travels in an entire year. Only now do we fly past our nearest neighbor stars almost 5 light-years away. The same journey at the speed of today’s spacecraft would last 100,000 years.
As we cross the perpetual night, our voyage takes us up and out of our Sun’s neighborhood near the edge of a great pinwheel of stars. The Milky Way is actually a (note: barred) spiral galaxy and our own Sun is just one of a hundred billion stars in it. At this immense scale, 23 powers of 10, each shining light we see is not a star but an entire galaxy composed of countless stars.
Astronomers have discovered that the galaxies are flying away from one another. The universe is expanding. Our own galaxy, and all the others form clusters and superclusters of stupendous size – hundreds of millions of light-years across. And here, about 15 billion light-years from Venice, we approach the outer limits of the visible universe. What lies beyond this cosmic horizon, we cannot see. And do not know.
王劍凡博士說,「地方」、「地境」、「空間」等中文詞語,沒有感情,很生硬,不像英文的「Place」跟「Space」,前者有感情,後者則不。比方說,你會講「You have a place in my heart.」,情意綿綿;不會講「You have a space in my heart.」,不倫不類。
退步的原因可以有很多。第一大原因是少讀了中文書。從前看書很廣、很雜,現在都沒這習慣了。半是懶惰,半是沒有時間,感覺整個人的文化質素沒從前的高,這樣的話會很鄙視自己。而且面書瀏覽得多,讀的多半是沒有質素、沒有修養、沒有品味的文字,那自己寫的文字怎麼會好呢?英文諺語有一句:You are what you eat。現在改一改:You are what you read。也成道理。
我絕對也擁抱這些宗教所持的某一些理念,因為大部分這些理念都是導人為善,而且是普世價值,不贅。但同時也必須指出,這並不代表我便需要或已經信奉了某一個宗教,也不代表所有信奉此宗教者能夠實行這些理念。上兩句所說的,亦說明了「某宗教」及「該宗教所擁抱的價值」兩者並沒有若且僅若(if and only if)的關係,正正也是我認為不需要相信任何宗教的另一原因。