TED英语演讲稿不幸也许是个机会演讲稿.docx

1、TED英语演讲稿不幸也许是个机会演讲稿TED英语演讲稿：不幸也许是个机会 简介：残奥会短跑冠军Aimee Mullins天生没有腓骨，从小就要学习靠义肢走路和奔跑。如今，她不仅是短跑选手、演员、模特，还是一位稳健的演讲者。她不喜欢字典中 “disabled”这个词，因为负面词汇足以毁掉一个人。但是，坦然面对不幸，你会发现等待你的是更多的机会。 Id 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

2、 thesaurus handy whenever Im writing anything, but Id already finished editing the piece, and I realized that I had never once in my life looked up the word disabled to see what Id find. Let me read you the entry. Disabled, adjective: crippled, helpless, useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, m

3、angled, lame, mutilated, run-down, worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile, decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; see also hurt, useless and weak. Antonyms, healthy, strong, capable. I was reading this list out loud to a friend and at

4、first was laughing, it was so ludicrous, but Id just gotten past mangled, and my voice broke, and I had to stop and collect myself from the emotional shock and impact that the assault from these words unleashed. You know, of course, this is my raggedy old thesaurus so Im thinking this must be an anc

5、ient 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 myself outside the family unit and as related to the other kids and the world around me. And, needless to say, thank God I wasnt using a thesaurus

6、back then. I mean, from this entry, it would seem that I was born into a world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever going for them, when in fact, today Im celebrated for the opportunities and adventures my life has procured. So, I immediately went to look up the 2019 on

7、line edition, expecting to find a revision worth noting. Heres the updated version of this entry. Unfortunately, its not much better. I find the last two words under Near Antonyms, particularly unsettling: whole and wholesome. So, its not just about the words. Its what we believe about people when w

8、e name them with these words. Its about the values behind the words, and how we construct those 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 curse verba

9、lly was so powerful, because 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 whos empowered? By casually doing something as simple as naming a person, a child, we might be putting lids and casting shadows o

10、n their power. Wouldnt 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, whose name, apparently, was too difficult for most Americans to prono

11、unce, 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. I loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital, with the exception of my physical therapy sessions. I had to do what seemed like innumerable repetitio

12、ns of exercises with these thick, elastic bands - different colors, you know - to help build up my leg muscles, and I hated these 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

13、 of doing these exercises, unsuccessfully, of course. And, one day, he came in to my session - exhaustive and unforgiving, these sessions - and he said to me, Wow. Aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, I think youre going to break one of those bands. When you do break it, Im going t

14、o give you a hundred bucks. Now, of course, this was a simple ploy on Dr. Ps part to get me to do the exercises I didnt want to do before the prospect of being the richest five-year-old in the second floor ward, but what he effectively did for me was reshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and

15、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 myself as an inherently strong, powerful and athletic person well into the future. This is an example of how adults in positions of p

16、ower can ignite the power of a child. But, in the previous instances of those thesaurus entries, our language isnt allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want, the possibility of an individual to see themselves as capable. Our language hasnt caught up with the changes in our societ

17、y, many of which have been brought about by technology. Certainly, from a medical standpoint, my legs, laser surgery for vision impairment, titanium knees and hip replacements for aging bodies that are allowing people to more fully engage with their abilities, and move beyond the limits that nature

18、has imposed on them - not to mention social networking platforms allow people to self-identify, to claim their own descriptions of themselves, 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

19、everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset. The human ability to adapt, its an interesting thing, because people have continually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, and Im going to make an admission: This phr

20、ase never sat right with me, and I always felt uneasy trying to answer peoples questions about it, and I think Im starting to figure out why. Implicit in this phrase of overcoming adversity is the idea that success, or happiness, is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscat

21、hed or unmarked by the experience, as if my successes 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 course, by a challenge, whethe

22、r physically, emotionally or both. And Im going to suggest that this is a good thing. Adversity isnt an obstacle that we need to get around in order to resume living our life. Its part of our life. And I tend to think of it like my shadow. Sometimes I see a lot of it, sometimes theres very little, b

23、ut its always with me. And, certainly, Im not trying to diminish the impact, the weight, of a persons struggle. There is adversity and challenge in life, and its all very real and relative to every single person, but the question isnt whether or not youre going to meet adversity, but how youre going

24、 to meet it. So, our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them to meet it well. And we do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel that theyre not equipped to adapt. Theres an important difference and distinction between the objective medical

25、fact of my being an amputee and the subjective societal opinion of whether or not Im disabled. And, truthfully, the only real and consistent disability Ive had to confront is the world ever thinking that I could be described by those definitions. In our desire to protect those we care about by givin

26、g 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 dont 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

27、 we fix it, serves to be more disabling to the individual than the pathology itself. 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 someones worth to our commun

28、ity. So we need to see through the pathology and into the range of human capability. And, most importantly, theres a partnership between those perceived deficiencies and our greatest creative ability. So its not about devaluing, or negating, these more trying times as something we want to avoid or s

29、weep under the rug, but instead to find those 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 ourselves up to it, embracing it, grappling with it, to use a wrestling term, maybe even dancing with it. And, perhaps,

30、 if we see adversity as natural, consistent and useful, were less burdened by the presence 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 paraphrase: I

31、ts 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 Darwins work, amongst others, we can recognize that the human ability to survive and flourish is driven by the st

32、ruggle of the human spirit through conflict into transformation. So, again, transformation, adaptation, is our greatest human skill. And, perhaps, until were tested, we dont know what were made of. Maybe thats what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of our own power. So, we can give ourselves a gift. We can re-imagine adversity as something more than just tough times. Maybe we can see it as change. Adversity is just change that we havent adapted ourselves to yet. I think the greatest adversity that weve created for ourselves is this idea of normalcy. Now, who