TED英语演讲稿：不幸也许是个机会
钱包颜色
I'd like to share with you a discovery that I made a few months ago while writing an article for Italian Wired. I always keep my thesaurus handy whenever I'm writing anything, but I'd already finished editing the piece, and I realized that I had never once in my life looked up the word "disabled" to e what I'd find.
剪纸大全 Let me read you the entry. "Disabled, adjective: crippled, helpless, uless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, run-down, worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, nile, decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; e also hurt, uless and weak. Antonyms, healthy, strong, capable." I was reading this list out loud to a friend and at first was laughing, it was so ludicrous, but I'd just gotten past "mangled," and my voice broke, and I had to stop and collect mylf from the emotional shock and impact that the assault from the words unleashed.
我的新班级 You know, of cour, this is my raggedy old thesaurus so I'm thinking this must be an ancient print date, right? But, in fact, the print date was the early 1980s, when I would have
been starting primary school and forming an understanding of mylf outside the family unit and as related to the other kids and the world around me. And, needless to say, thank God I wasn't using a thesaurus back then. I mean, from this entry, it would em that I was born into a world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever going for them, when in fact, today I'm celebrated for the opportunities and adventures my life has procured.
So, I immediately went to look up the 2019 online edition, expecting to find a revision worth noting. Here's the updated version of this entry. Unfortunately, it's not much better. I find the last two words under "Near Antonyms," particularly unttling: "whole" and "wholesome."
So, it's not just about the words. It's what we believe about people when we name them with the words. It's about the values behind the words, and how we construct tho values. Our language affects our thinking and how we view the world and how we view other people. In fact, many ancient societies, including the Greeks and the Romans, believed that to utter a cur verbally was so powerful, becau to say the thing out loud
brought it into existence. So, what reality do we want to call into existence: a person who is limited, or a person who's empowered? By casually doing something as simple as naming a person, a child, we might be putting lids and casting shadows on their power. Wouldn't we want to open doors for them instead?
One such person who opened doors for me was my childhood doctor at the A.I. duPont Institute in Wilmington, Delaware. His name was Dr. Pizzutillo, an Italian American, who name, apparently, was too difficult for most Americans to pronounce, so he went by Dr. P. And Dr. P always wore really colorful bow ties and had the very perfect disposition to work with children.
炉石传说脏牧 I loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital, with the exception of my physical therapy ssions. I had to do what emed like innumerable repetitions of exercis with the thick, elastic bands -- different colors, you know -- to help build up my leg muscles, and I hated the bands more than anything -- I hated them, had names for them. I hated them. And, you know, I was already bargaining, as a five year-old child, with Dr. P to try to get out of doing the exercis, unsuccessfully, of cour. And, one d
ay, he came in to my ssion -- exhaustive and unforgiving, the ssions -- and he said to me, "Wow. Aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, I think you're going to break one of tho bands. When you do break it, I'm going to give you a hundred bucks."
Now, of cour, this was a simple ploy on Dr. P's part to get me to do the exercis I didn't want to do before the prospect of being the richest five-year-old in the cond floor ward, but what he effectively did for me was reshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising experience for me. And I have to wonder today to what extent his vision and his declaration of me as a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of mylf as an inherently strong, powerful and athletic person well into the future.从头越
This is an example of how adults in positions of power can ignite the power of a child. But, in the previous instances of tho thesaurus entries, our language isn't allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want, the possibility of an individual to e themlves as capable. Our language hasn't caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have been brought about by technology. Certainly, from a medical standpoint, my legs, lar surgery for vision impairment, titanium knees and hip replacem
ents for aging bodies that are allowing people to more fully engage with their abilities, and move beyond the limits that nature has impod on them -- not to mention social networking platforms allow people to lf-identify, to claim their own descriptions of themlves, so they can go align with global groups of their own choosing. So, perhaps technology is revealing more clearly to us now what has always been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest ast.
The human ability to adapt, it's an interesting thing, becau people have continually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, and I'm going to make an admission: This phra never sat right with me, and I always felt uneasy trying to answer people's questions about it, and I think I'm starting to figure out why. Implicit in this phra of "overcoming adversity" is the idea that success, or happiness, is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscathed or unmarked by the experience, as if my success in life have come about from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumed pitfalls of a life with prosthetics, or what other people perceive as my disability.
But, in fact, we are changed. We are marked, of cour, by a challenge, whether physically, emotionally or both. And I'm going to suggest that this is a good thing. Adversity isn't an obstacle that we need to get around in order to resume living our life. It's part of our life. And I tend to think of it like my shadow. Sometimes I e a lot of it, sometimes there's very little, but it's always with me. And, certainly, I'm not trying to diminish the impact, the weight, of a person's struggle.
There is adversity and challenge in life, and it's all very real and relative to every single person, but the question isn't whether or not you're going to meet adversity, but how you're going to meet it. So, our responsibility is not simply shielding tho we care for from adversity, but preparing them to meet it well. And we do a disrvice to our kids when we make them feel that they're not equipped to adapt. There's an important difference and distinction between the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjective societal opinion of whether or not I'm disabled. And, truthfully, the only real and consistent disability I've had to confront is the world ever thinking that I could be described by tho definitions.
In our desire to protect tho we care about by giving them the cold, hard truth about their medical prognosis, or, indeed, a prognosis on the expected quality of their life, we have to make sure that we don't put the first brick in a wall that will actually disable someone. Perhaps the existing model of only looking at what is broken in you and how do we fix it, rves to be more disabling to the individual than the pathology itlf.
By not treating the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging their potency, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle they might have. We are effectively grading someone's worth to our community. So we need to e through the pathology and into the range of human capability. And, most importantly, there's a partnership between tho perceived deficiencies and our greatest creative ability. So it's not about devaluing, or negating, the more trying times as something we want to avoid or sweep under the rug, but instead to find tho opportunities wrapped in the adversity. So maybe the idea I want to put out there is not so much overcoming adversity as it is opening ourlves up to it, embracing it, grappling with it, to u a wrestling term, maybe even dancing with it. And, perhaps, if we e adversity as natural, consistent and uful,
we're less burdened by the prence of it.
This year we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and it was 150 years ago, when writing about evolution, that Darwin illustrated, I think, a truth about the human character. To paraphra: It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent that survives; it is the one that is most adaptable to change. Conflict is the genesis of creation. From Darwin's work, amongst others, we can recognize that the human ability to survive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit through conflict into transformation. So, again, transformation, adaptation, is our greatest human skill. And, perhaps, until we're tested, we don't know what we're made of. Maybe that's what adversity gives us: a n of lf, a n of our own power. So, we can give ourlves a gift. We can re-imagine adversity as something more than just tough times. Maybe we can e it as change. Adversity is just change that we haven't adapted ourlves to yet.
I think the greatest adversity that we've created for ourlves is this idea of normalcy. Now, who's normal? There's no normal. There's common, there's typical. There's no norm
al, and would you want to meet that poor, beige person if they existed? (Laughter) I don't think so. If we can change this paradigm from one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility -- or potency, to be even a little bit more dangerous -- we can relea the power of so many more children, and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with the community.
Anthropologists tell us that the one thing we as humans have always required of our community members is to be of u, to be able to contribute. There's evidence that Neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, carried their elderly and tho with rious physical injury, and perhaps it's becau the life experience of survival of the people proved of value to the community. They didn't view the people as broken and uless; they were en as rare and valuable.信息安全保障
A few years ago, I was in a food market in the town where I grew up in that red zone in northeastern Pennsylvania, and I was standing over a bushel of tomatoes. It was summertime: I had shorts on. I hear this guy, his voice behind me say, "Well, if it isn't Aimee Mullins." And I turn around, and it's this older man. I have no idea who he is.
And I said, "I'm sorry, sir, have we met? I don't remember meeting you."
He said, "Well, you wouldn't remember meeting me. I mean, when we met I was delivering you from your mother's womb." (Laughter) Oh, that guy. And, but of cour, actually, it did click.
This man was Dr. Kean, a man that I had only known about through my mother's stories of that day, becau, of cour, typical fashion, I arrived late for my birthday by two weeks. And so my mother's prenatal physician had gone on vacation, so the man who delivered me was a complete stranger to my parents. And, becau I was born without the fibula bones, and had feet turned in, and a few toes in this foot and a few toes in that, he had to be the bearer -- this stranger had to be the bearer of bad news.
女人独立 He said to me, "I had to give this prognosis to your parents that you would never walk, and you would never have the kind of mobility that other kids have or any kind of life of independence, and you've been making liar out of me ever since." (Laughter) (Applau)
The extraordinary thing is that he said he had saved newspaper clippings throughout my whole childhood, whether winning a cond grade spelling bee, marching with the Girl Sc
outs, you know, the Halloween parade, winning my college scholarship, or any of my sports victories, and he was using it, and integrating it into teaching resident students, med students from Hahnemann Medical School and Hershey Medical School. And he called this part of the cour the X Factor, the potential of the human will. No prognosis can account for how powerful this could be as a determinant in the quality of someone's life. And Dr. Kean went on to tell me, he said, "In my experience, unless repeatedly told otherwi, and even if given a modicum of support, if left to their own devices, a child will achieve."
See, Dr. Kean made that shift in thinking. He understood that there's a difference between the medical condition and what someone might do with it. And there's been a shift in my thinking over time, in that, if you had asked me at 15 years old, if I would have traded prosthetics for flesh-and-bone legs, I wouldn't have hesitated for a cond. I aspired to that kind of normalcy back then. But if you ask me today, I'm not so sure. And it's becau of the experiences I've had with them, not in spite of the experiences I've had with them. And perhaps this shift in me has happened becau I've been expod to mor
e people who have opened doors for me than tho who have put lids and cast shadows on me.
See, all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your own power, and you're off. If you can hand somebody the key to their own power -- the human spirit is so receptive -- if you can do that and open a door for someone at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best n. You're teaching them to open doors for themlves. In fact, the exact meaning of the word "educate" comes from the root word "educe." It means "to bring forth what is within, to bring out potential." So again, which potential do we want to bring out?
There was a ca study done in 1960s Britain, when they were moving from grammar schools to comprehensive schools. It's called the streaming trials. We call it "tracking" here in the States. It's parating students from A, B, C, D and so on. And the "A students" get the tougher curriculum, the best teachers, etc. Well, they took, over a three-month period, D-level students, gave them A's, told them they were "A's," told them they were bright, and at the end of this three-month period, they were performing at A-level.
鸡油菌的功效与作用 And, of cour, the heartbreaking, flip side of this study, is that they took the "A students" and told them they were "D's." And that's what happened at the end of that three-month period. Tho who were still around in school, besides the people who had dropped out. A crucial part of this ca study was that the teachers were duped too. The teachers didn't know a switch had been made. They were simply told, "The are the 'A-students,' the are the 'D-students.'" And that's how they went about teaching them and treating them.
So, I think that the only true disability is a crushed spirit, a spirit that's been crushed doesn't have hope, it doesn't e beauty, it no longer has our natural, childlike curiosity and our innate ability to imagine. If instead, we can bolster a human spirit to keep hope, to e beauty in themlves and others, to be curious and imaginative, then we are truly using our power well. When a spirit has tho qualities, we are able to create new realities and new ways of being.
I'd like to leave you with a poem by a fourteenth-century Persian poet named Hafiz that my friend, Jacques Dembois told me about, and the poem is called "The God Who Only
Knows Four Words": "Every child has known God, not the God of names, not the God of don'ts, but the God who only knows four words and keeps repeating them, saying, 'Come dance with me. Come, dance with me. Come, dance with me.'"
Thank you. (Applau)
