晨读英语美文 Life Isn't a Dress Rehearsal

Life Isn't a Dress Rehearsal

[00:09.56]A happy life is just under our control. 

[00:13.88]Your life can be enhanced, 

[00:16.61]and your happiness enriched

[00:18.84]when you choose to develop a new perspective 

[00:21.93]to get a new life. 

[00:23.13]Get a life, a real life, 

[00:25.53]not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, 

[00:28.93]the bigger paycheck, the larger house. 

[00:31.51]Get a life in which you are not alone. 

[00:34.57]Find people you love, and who love you. 

[00:37.88]And remember that love is not leisure; 

[00:41.00]it is work. Pick up the phone. 

[00:44.14]Send an e-mail. Write a letter. 

[00:47.39]Get a life in which you are generous. 

[00:50.75]And realize that life is the best thing ever, 

[00:54.22]and that you have no business taking it for granted. 

[00:57.85]It is so easy to waste our lives, 

[01:01.10]our days, our hours, our minutes. 

[01:04.39]It is so easy to take for granted 

[01:07.62]the color of our kid's eyes, 

[01:09.64]the way the melody in a symphony rises and falls 

[01:13.54]and disappears and rises again... 

[01:16.48]It is so easy to exist instead of to live.

[01:20.78] I learned to live many years ago. 

[01:23.79]Something really, really bad happened to me, 

[01:27.56]something that changed my life in ways that, 

[01:31.48]if I had my option, 

[01:33.69]it would never have been changed at all. 

[01:36.22]And what I learned from it is what, 

[01:39.09]today, seems to be the hardest lesson of all. 

[01:43.48]I learned to love the journey, not the destination. 

[01:48.15]I learned that it is not a dress rehearsal, 

[01:51.65]and that today is the only guarantee you get.

[01:55.41]I learned to look at all the good in the world 

[01:59.04]and try to give some of it back 

[02:01.36]because I believed in it, completely and utterly. 

[02:04.92]And I tried to do that, in part, 

[02:08.48]by telling others what I had learned, 

[02:11.34]by telling them this: 

[02:13.10]Consider the lilies of the field. 

[02:16.22]Look at the fuzz on a baby's ear. 

[02:19.86]Read in the backyard with the sun on your face. 

[02:24.41]Learn to be happy. 

[02:26.14]And think of life as a terminal illness, 

[02:29.77]because if you do, 

[02:31.33]you will live it with joy and passion 

[02:34.50]as it ought to be lived.

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