相信自己

I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a freight yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I am thirty-two. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what red color is. It would be wonderful to see again， but a calamity can do strange things to people.

It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn’t been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply， otherwise. I don’t mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had left.

Life， I believe， asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments， the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was bewildered and afraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me—a potential to live， you might call it —which I didn’t see， and they made me want to fight it out with blindness.

The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If I hadn’t been able to do that， I would have collapsed and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say belief in myself I am not talking about simply the kind of self-confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is part of it. But I mean something bigger than that： an assurance that I am， despite imperfections， a real， positive person that somewhere in the sweeping， intricate pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit.

It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball， I thought he was mocking me and I was hurt. “I can’t use this，” I said. “Take it with you，” he urged me， “and roll it around.” The words stuck in my head. Then at Philadelphia’s Overbrook School for the Blind I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it “Ground Ball”.

All my life I have set ahead of is a series of goals and then tried to reach them， one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good to try for something I knew at the start was wildly out of reach because that only invited the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway but on the average I made progress. That is the power of believing in myself.

4歲那年在大西洋城，我從貨場一輛兩廂車上摔下來，頭先著地，造成了雙目失明。現在我已經32歲了。我還能依稀地記得陽光是多么燦爛，紅色是多么鮮艷。如果能恢復視覺固然非常好，但災難有時也能對人產生奇妙的作用。

有一天我突然想到，倘若不是盲人，我或許不會像現在這樣如此地熱愛生活。現在的我相信生活，但我不能肯定如果我沒有失明，會不會像現在這樣對生活堅信不移。我并不是說我愿意成為盲人，我只是想說失去視力使我更加珍惜自己的所有。

我認為，生活要求人不斷地調整自我以適應現實。人的調整能力越強，他的個人世界便會變得越有意義。調整決非易事。我曾感到茫然害怕，但我很幸運，我的父母和老師在我身上發現了某種東西——可以稱之為生存的潛力吧——而我自己卻并不知道。是他們激勵我與失明拼搏到底。

我必須學會的最艱難的一課就是相信自己，這是最基本的。如果做不到這一點，我的人就會垮掉，然后坐在前門廊的搖椅中度過余生。我所說的相信自己并不單純地指相信自己能獨自走下陌生的樓梯，那只是一方面。我指的是更重要的東西：是堅信自己雖然有缺陷，卻是一個真正的有進取心的人;堅信在蕓蕓眾生錯綜復雜的格局當中，自有我可以安身立命的一席之地。

我花了很長時間才堅定了這一信念。這要從最簡單的事做起。有一次一個人給我一個室內玩的棒球，我以為他在嘲笑我，心里很難受。“我玩不了這個。”我說。“拿著吧，你可以讓它在地面滾動的。”他竭力勸我。他的話觸動了我。隨后，在費城的奧弗布魯克盲人學校，我發明了一種很受歡迎的棒球游戲，我們稱其為“地面球”。

我的一生中給自己樹立了一系列目標，然后努力去完成，一次完成一個。我必須清楚自己的局限，若開始就知道某個目標根本達不到卻硬要去實現，那不會帶來任何好處，只會帶來失敗的苦果。我有時也會失敗，但一般來說總會取得進步。這就是相信自己帶來的力量。