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连载一
This story is about the writer of ‘the 7 habits of the highly effective people’ and his wife. They found a way to make an inside communication, and from the communication they keep in a good relationship.
Speed 1
I would like to share with you a personal story which I feel contains the essence of this book. In doing so, it is my hope that you will relate to the underlying principles it contains. Some years ago, our family took a sabbatical leave from the university where I taught so that I could write. We lived for a full year in Laie on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii. Shortly after getting settled, we developed a living and working routine which was not only very productive but extremely pleasant. After an early morning run on the beach, we would send two of our children, barefoot and in shorts, to school. I went to an isolated building next to the cane fields where I had an office to do my writing. It was very quiet, very beautiful, very serene no phone, no meetings, no pressing engagements. My office was on the outside edge of the college, and one day as I was wandering between stacks of books in the back of the college library, I came across a book that drew my interest. As I opened it, my eyes fell upon a single paragraph that powerfully influenced the rest of my life. Read the paragraph over and over again. It basically contained the simple idea that there is a gap or a space between stimulus and response, and that the key to both our growth and happiness is how we use that space. I can hardly describe the effect that idea had on my mind. Though I had been nurtured in the philosophy of self determinism, the way the idea was phrased "a gap between stimulus and response" hit me with fresh, almost unbelievable force.
[286]
Speed 2
It was almost like "knowing it for the first time," like an inward revolution, "an idea whose time had come." I reflected on it again and again, and it began to have a powerful effect on my paradigm of life. It was as if I had become an observer of my own participation. I began to stand in that gap and to look outside at the stimuli. I reveled in the inward sense of freedom to choose my response even to become the stimulus, or at least to influence it ，even to reverse it.
Shortly thereafter, and partly as a result of this "revolutionary" idea, Sandra and I began a practice of deep communication. I would pick her up a little before noon on an old red Honda 90 trail cycle, and we would take our two preschool children with us one between us and the other on my left knee. As we rode out in the cane fields by my office, we rode slowly along for about an hour, just talking. The children looked forward to the ride and hardly ever made any noise. We seldom saw another vehicle, and the cycle was so quiet we could easily hear each other. We usually ended up on an isolated beach where we parked the Honda and walked about 200 yards to a secluded spot where we ate a picnic lunch.
The sandy beach and a freshwater river coming off the island totally absorbed the interest of the children, so Sandra and I were able to continue our talks uninterrupted. Perhaps it doesn't take too much imagination to envision the level of understanding and trust we were able to reach by spending at least two hours a day, every day, for a full year in deep communication.
[297]
Speed 3
At the very first of the year, we talked about all kinds of interesting topics people, ideas, events, the children, my writing, our family at home, future plans, and so forth. But little by little, our communication deepened and we began to talk more and more about our internal worlds about our upbringing, our scripting, our feelings, and self doubts. As we were deeply immersed in these communications, we also observed them and observed ourselves in them. We began to use that space between stimulus and response in some new and interesting ways which caused us to think about how we were programmed and how those programs shaped how we saw the world. We began an exciting adventure into our interior worlds and found it to be more exciting, more fascinating, more absorbing, more compelling, more filled with discovery and insight than anything we'd even known in the outside world. It wasn't all "sweetness and light." We occasionally hit some raw nerves and had some painful experiences, embarrassing experiences, self revealing experiences that made us extremely open and vulnerable to each other. And yet we found we had been wanting to go into those things for years. When we did go into the deeper, more tender issues and then came out of them, we felt in some way healed. We were so initially supportive and helpful, so encouraging and empathic to each other, that we nurtured and facilitated these internal discoveries in each other.
[244]
Speed 4
We gradually evolved two unspoken ground rules. The first was "no probing." As soon as we unfolded the inner layers of vulnerability, we were not to question each other, only to empathize. Probing was simply too invasive. It was also too controlling and too logical. We were covering new, difficult terrain that was scary and uncertain, and it stirred up fears and doubts. We wanted to cover more and more of it, but we grew to respect the need to let each other open up in our own time. The second ground rule was that when it hurt too much, when it was painful, we would simply quit for the day. Then we would either begin the next day where we left off or wait until the person who was sharing felt ready to continue. We carried around the loose ends, knowing that we wanted to deal with them. But because we had the time and the environment conducive to it, and because we were so excited to observe our own involvement and to grow within our marriage, we simply knew that sooner or later we would deal with all those loose ends and bring them to some kind of closure.
The most difficult, and eventually the most fruitful part of this kind of communication came when my vulnerability and Sandra's vulnerability touched. Then, because of our subjective involvement, we found that the space between stimulus and response was no longer there. A few bad feelings surfaced. But our deep desire and our implicit agreement was to prepare ourselves to start where we left off and deal with those feelings until we resolved them.
[270]
Speed 5
One of those difficult times had to do with a basic tendency in my personality. My father was a very private individual very controlled and very careful. My mother was and is very public, very open, very spontaneous. I find both sets of tendencies in me, and when I feel insecure, I tend to become private, like my father. I live inside myself and safely observe. Sandra is more like my mother social, authentic, and spontaneous. We had gone through many experiences over the years in which I felt her openness was inappropriate, and she felt my constraint was dysfunctional, both socially and to me as an individual because I would become insensitive to the feelings of others. All of this and much more came out during those deep visits. I came to value Sandra's insight and wisdom and the way she helped me to be a more open, giving, sensitive, social person. Another of those difficult times had to do with what I perceived to be a "hang up" Sandra had which had bothered me for years. She seemed to have an obsession about Frigidaire appliances which I was at an absolute loss to understand. She would not even consider buying another brand of appliance.
[200]
Sorry CDers. Since there are some problems with my computer, I cannot download materials from website, and stick two passages from the reading materials of LSAT.
Wish you happy the festival of reunion.
Obstacle
（一）In England before 1660, a husband controlled his wife’s property. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the shift from land-based to commercial wealth, marriage began to incorporate certain features of a contract. Historian have traditionally argued that this trend represented a gain for women, one that reflects changing views about democracy and property following the English Restoration in 1660. Susan Staves contests this view; she argues that whatever gains marriage contracts may briefly have represented for women were undermined by judicial decisions about women’s contractual rights.
Sifting (to go through especially to sort out what is useful or valuable “sifted the evidence” often used with through “sift through a pile of old letters”) through the tangled details of court cases, Staves demonstrates that, despite surface changes, a rhetoric of equality, and occasional decisions supporting women’s financial power, definitions of men’s and women’s property remained inconsistent—generally to women’s detriment. For example, dower lands (property inherited by wives after their husbands’ deaths) could not be sold, but “curtsey” property (inherited by husbands from their wives) could be sold. Furthermore, comparatively new concepts that developed in conjunction with the marriage contract, such as jointure, pin money (pin money: money given by a man to his wife for her own use), and separate maintenance, were compromised by peculiar rules. For instance, if a woman spent her pin money (money paid by the husband according to the marriage contract for wife’s personal items) on possessions other than clothes she could not sell them; in effect they belonged to her husband. In addition, a wife could sue for pin money only up to a year in arrears—which rendered a suit impractical. Similarly, separate maintenance allowances (stated sums of money for the wife’s support if husband and wife agreed to live apart) were complicated by the fact that if a couple tried to agree in a marriage contract on an amount, they were admitting that a supposedly indissoluble bond could be dissolved, an assumption courts could not recognize. Eighteenth-century historians underplayed these inconsistencies, calling them “little contrarieties” that would soon vanish. Staves shows, however, that as judges gained power over decisions on marriage contracts, they tended to fall back on pre-1660 assumptions about property.
Staves’ work on women’s property has general implications for other studies about women in eighteenth-century England. Staves revised her previous claim that separate maintenance allowances proved the weakening of patriarchy; she now finds that an oversimplification. She also challenges the contention by historians Jeanne and Lawrence Stone that in the late eighteenth century wealthy men married widows less often than before because couples began marring for love rather than for financial reasons. Staves does not completely undermine their contention, but she does counter their assumption that widows had more money than never-married women. She points out that jointure property (a widow’s lifetime use of an amount of money specified in the marriage contract) was often lost on remarriage.
（二）
The myth persists that in 1492 the Western Hemisphere was an untamed wilderness and that it was European settlers who harnessed and transformed its ecosystems. But scholarship shows that forests, in particular, had been altered to varying degrees well before the arrival of Europeans. Native populations had converted much of the forests to successfully cultivated stands, especially by means of burning. Nevertheless, some researchers have maintained that the extent, frequency, and impact of such burning was minimal. One geographer claims that climatic change could have accounted for some of the changes in forest composition; another argues that burning by native populations was done only sporadically, to augment the effects of natural fires.
However, a large body of evidence for the routine practice of burning exists in the geographical record. One group of researchers found, for example, that sedimentary charcoal accumulations in what is now the northeastern United States are greatest where known native American settlements were greatest. Other evidence shows that, while the characteristics and impact of fires set by native populations varied regionally according to population size, extent of resource management techniques, and environment, all such fires had markedly different effects on vegetation patter than did natural fires. Controlled burning crated grassy openings such as meadows and glades. Burning also promoted a mosaic quality to North and south American ecosystems, creating forests in many different stages of ecological development. Much of the mature forestland was characterized by open herbaceous undergrowth, another result of the clearing brought about by burning.
In North American, controlled burning crated conditions favorable to berries and other fire-tolerant and sun-loving foods. Burning also converted mixed stands of trees to homogeneous forest, for example the longleaf, slash pine, and scrub oak forests of the southeastern U.S. natural fires do account for some of this vegetation, but regular burning clearly extended and maintained it. Burning also influenced forest composition in the tropics, where natural fires are rare. An example is the pine-dominant forests of Nicaragua, where warm temperatures and heavy rainfall naturally favor mixed tropical or rain forests. While there are primarily grow in cooler, drier, higher elevations, regions where such vegetation is in large part natural and even prehuman. Today, the Nicaraguan pines occur where there has been clearing followed by regular burning, and the same is likely to have occurred in the past: such forests ere present when Europeans arrived and were found only in areas where native settlements were substantial; when these settlements were abandoned, the land returned to mixed hardwoods. This succession is also evident elsewhere in similar low tropical elevations in the Caribbean and Mexico.
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发表于 2012-9-29 23:23:38
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