聽力課堂TED音頻欄目主要包括TED演講的音頻MP3及中英雙語文稿,供各位英語愛好者學習使用。本文主要內容為演講MP3+雙語文稿:面對人生低谷,我們如何走出來?-芝加哥大學教授,希望你會喜歡!
【主講人】David Brooks
【主題】《面對人生低谷,我們如何走出來?》
【中英文字幕】獲取完整版字幕
翻譯者Cissy Yun 校對者Ziyao Wang
00:05
So, we all have bad seasons in life. And Ihad one in 2013. My marriage had just ended, and I was humiliated by thatfailed commitment. My kids had left home for college or were leaving. I grew upmostly in the conservative movement, but conservatism had changed, so I lost alot of those friends, too.
人生總會經歷枯季。我的枯季在2013年。我的婚姻破裂了,我失敗的婚姻讓我感到羞辱。我的孩子們離開家 去上大學了。我在保守派運動中成長,但如今,保守主義變了,因此我失去了不少老朋友。
00:24
And so what I did is, I lived alone in anapartment, and I just worked. If you opened the kitchen drawers where thereshould have been utensils, there were Post-it notes. If you opened the otherdrawers where there should have been plates, I had envelopes. I had workfriends, weekday friends, but I didn't have weekend friends. And so my weekendswere these long, howling silences. And I was lonely. And loneliness,unexpectedly, came to me in the form of -- it felt like fear, a burning in mystomach. And it felt a little like drunkenness, just making bad decisions, justfluidity, lack of solidity. And the painful part of that moment was theawareness that the emptiness in my apartment was just reflective of theemptiness in myself, and that I had fallen for some of the lies that ourculture tells us.
我能做的僅是 獨居于公寓中,埋頭工作。若你在我家拉開廚具抽屜,你看到會是各種便利貼。你若拉開盤具抽屜,那兒將充滿信封。我有同事朋友,工作日的友人, 但到周末,我又是孤身一人。我的周末是漫長的寂靜。我很孤獨。寂寞以意想不到的方式擊垮了我,它像是一種恐懼, 一種胃中的焦灼感。有時又像是醉酒的感覺,我無法作出正確的選擇, 一切都隨波逐流,毫無立足點。最讓我痛苦的是,我意識到空空蕩蕩的公寓 只是我內心空虛的一種外在映射,我被我們的文化中的謊言欺騙。
01:19
The first lie is that career success isfulfilling. I've had a fair bit of career success, and I've found that it helpsme avoid the shame I would feel if I felt myself a failure, but it hasn't givenme any positive good.
第一條謊言是 事業(yè)成功會讓你感到滿足。我在事業(yè)上是小有成就,它幫助我避免那種 覺得自己是個廢物的挫敗感,但它也給不了我 任何的正能量。
01:32
The second lie is I can make myself happy,that if I just win one more victory, lose 15 pounds, do a little more yoga,I'll get happy. And that's the lie of self-sufficiency. But as anybody on theirdeathbed will tell you, the things that make people happy is the deep relationshipsof life, the losing of self-sufficiency.
第二個謊言是 若我可以再勝利一次,我可以讓自己變快樂。像是減肥15磅,做一下瑜伽,我就會變得開心起來。這是“自給自足”的謊言。任何即將離世的人 都會跟你說,人生中最愉悅的莫過于各種深厚的交情,忘記自給自足的概念。
01:56
The third lie is the lie of themeritocracy. The message of the meritocracy is you are what you accomplish. Themyth of the meritocracy is you can earn dignity by attaching yourself toprestigious brands. The emotion of the meritocracy is conditional love, you can"earn" your way to love. The anthropology of the meritocracy is you'renot a soul to be purified, you're a set of skills to be maximized. And the evilof the meritocracy is that people who've achieved a little more than others areactually worth a little more than others. And so the wages of sin are sin. Andmy sins were the sins of omission-- not reaching out, failing to show up for myfriends, evasion, avoiding conflict.
第三個是關于 精英主義的謊言。這個主義傳遞著一個信息: 你的成就造就了你。精英主義告訴人們, 他們可以通過穿戴名牌贏得自尊。精英主義是有條件的愛,你可以努力“掙”到愛。精英主義不會把你看作一個需要被救贖的靈魂,而是技能被最大化利用的技能套裝。它最邪惡之處是比別人取得多一點成就的人會被看作更有價值。罪的代價還是罪惡。而我的罪在于我的疏忽,沒有主動去社交, 沒有和友人保持聯系,回避、繞開沖突。
02:35
And the weird thing was that as I wasfalling into the valley -- it was a valley of disconnection -- a lot of otherpeople were doing that, too. And that's sort of the secret to my career; a lotof the things that happen to me are always happening to a lot of other people.I'm a very average person with above average communication skills.
更奇怪的是,當我 漸漸跌入低谷中時--就與外界失聯了--很多人也正經歷著這些。這也算是我事業(yè)的秘密吧,我的人生中發(fā)生的事,通常也會發(fā)生在其他人身上。我是個平凡的人, 雖然我的溝通能力還行。
02:52
(Laughter)
02:53
And so I was detached. And at the sametime, a lot of other people were detached and isolated and fragmented from eachother. Thirty-five percent of Americans over 45 are chronically lonely. Onlyeight percent of Americans report having meaningful conversation with theirneighbors. Only 32 percent of Americans say they trust their neighbors, andonly 18 percent of millennials. The fastest-growing political party isunaffiliated. The fastest-growing religious movement is unaffiliated. Depressionrates are rising, mental health problems are rising. The suicide rate has risen30 percent since 1999. For teen suicides over the last several years, thesuicide rate has risen by 70 percent. Forty-five thousand Americans killthemselves every year; 72,000 die from opioid addictions; life expectancy isfalling, not rising.
我產生被孤立感的同時,很多人也有同感, 感到自己是座孤島,與別人被拆分開。百分之三十五45歲以上的 美國人長期感到孤獨。只有百分之八的美國人 與他們的鄰居之間有過深度交談。只有百分之三十二的美國人, 以及百分之十八的千禧一代說他們信任他們的鄰居。發(fā)展最快的政治黨派是獨立的。擴張得最快的宗教運動 也是與別的宗教無關聯的。抑郁癥比例在上升,心理疾病變得更普遍。自殺率自1999年 上升了百分之三十。近幾年青少年自殺率上升了百分之七十。每年四萬五千美國人死于自殺,七萬兩千死于鴉片類藥品上癮;平均壽命在變短而不是變長。
03:41
So what I mean to tell you, I flew out hereto say that we have an economic crisis, we have environmental crisis, we have apolitical crisis. We also have a social and relational crisis; we're in thevalley. We're fragmented from each other, we've got cascades of lies coming outof Washington ... We're in the valley.
所以我今天來到這里想說的是如今人類面臨著經濟、環(huán)境危機還有政治危機。我們還經歷著社交 與人際關系危機。我們正處于那個低谷。人際關系支離破碎,而政界也是謊話連篇...我們困在了這個低谷。
03:57
And so I've spent the last five years --how do you get out of a valley? The Greeks used to say, "You suffer yourway to wisdom." And from that dark period where I started, I've had a fewrealizations. The first is, freedom sucks. Economic freedom is OK, politicalfreedom is great, social freedom sucks. The unrooted man is the adrift man. Theunrooted man is the unremembered man, because he's uncommitted to things.Freedom is not an ocean you want to swim in, it's a river you want to getacross, so you can commit and plant yourself on the other side.
在過去的這五年中,我一直在思考 如何走出這個低谷。古希臘人常說說, “必經磨難,終得智慧”。在我人生那段黑暗時光中, 我有了些許認識。第一,自由糟透了。經濟自由還可以, 政治自由非常好,社交自由是件壞事。無根之人注定要漂泊。無根之人注定會被遺忘, 因為他從不會做出承諾。自由不是你可暢游的海洋,而是你需跨越的一條河流,這樣你才可以 扎根于河對岸。
04:33
The second thing I learned is that when youhave one of those bad moments in life, you can either be broken, or you can bebroken open. And we all know people who are broken. They've endured some painor grief, they get smaller, they get angrier, resentful, they lash out. As thesaying is, "Pain that is not transformed gets transmitted." But otherpeople are broken open. Suffering's great power is that it's an interruption oflife. It reminds you you're not the person you thought you were. The theologianPaul Tillich said what suffering does is it carves through what you thought wasthe floor of the basement of your soul, and it carves through that, revealing acavity below, and it carves through that, revealing a cavity below. You realizethere are depths of yourself you never anticipated, and only spiritual andrelational food will fill those depths. And when you get down there, you getout of the head of the ego and you get into the heart, the desiring heart. Theidea that what we really yearn for is longing and love for another, the kind ofthing that Louis de Bernières described in his book, "Captain Corelli'sMandolin." He had an old guy talking to his daughter about hisrelationship with his late wife, and the old guy says, "Love itself iswhatever is leftover when being in love is burned away. And this is both an artand a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it. We had roots that grewtowards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossoms had fallenfrom our branches, we discovered that we are one tree and not two." That'swhat the heart yearns for.
我學到的第二件事是,當壞事發(fā)生在你身上時,你不是被打擊,就是思維被打開。我們都認識受過打擊的人。他們忍受著痛苦與 悲傷,愈加變小,愈發(fā)憤世嫉俗,抨擊時事。俗話說,“不被轉化的痛苦會被傳播”。另一些人的思維會被磨難打開。磨難的破壞力在于 它會擾亂正常生活。它會提醒你,你與想象中的自己不一樣。神學家保羅·提利時說磨難會穿透你以為是你的靈魂最深的地方,露出一個蛀洞,然后再往深處挖掘, 露出又一個蛀洞。你觸及到深度是 你從未預料到的,而能填補那深層空虛的只有精神糧食和人際關系。當你到達那深處, 你會忘記自我,觸及心靈,充滿渴求的心靈。我們真正想要的是 對他人的愛與思念,路易·德博尼爾在他的書中 寫過有關的感受。在《柯萊利上尉的曼陀林》中,他寫了一個老人和他女兒訴說他與去世的妻子的故事,老人說到,“愛的本質是熱愛之火 燒盡時剩下的一切。這既是一種藝術,也是幸運的巧合。你媽媽和我有幸擁有它。我們的根在地底深深纏繞,當那些美麗的花瓣 從樹枝上凋落時,我們發(fā)現,我們早已融為一棵大樹。”這是我們心之所求。
05:59
The second thing you discover is your soul.Now, I don't ask you to believe in God or not believe in God, but I do ask youto believe that there's a piece of you that has no shape, size, color orweight, but that gives you infinite dignity and value. Rich and successfulpeople don't have more of this than less successful people. Slavery is wrongbecause it's an obliteration of another soul. Rape is not just an attack on abunch of physical molecules, it's an attempt to insult another person's soul.And what the soul does is it yearns for righteousness. The heart yearns forfusion with another, the soul yearns for righteousness. And that led to mythird realization, which I borrowed from Einstein: "The problem you haveis not going to be solved at the level of consciousness on which you createdit. You have to expand to a different level of consciousness."
第二件事是 你會認識自己的靈魂。我并非要傳教, 讓你去相信上帝,但我希望你可以相信你的一部分是無形,無色,無量的,但它能給予你無限的自尊和價值。富有、成功人士并不會比那些尚未成功之人 多一絲的靈魂。奴隸制之所以是錯的是因為它試圖抹殺一個靈魂。強奸不僅是對肉體的折磨,更是對一個靈魂的褻瀆。靈魂渴求的是正義。心之所求是與另一顆心的融合, 而靈魂之所求則是正義。這也讓我意識到第三件事, 這里我借用愛因斯坦的話:“用產生問題的思維解決問題是行不通的。你要拓展思維至新的層次”。
06:47
So what do you do? Well, the first thingyou do is you throw yourself on your friends and you have deeper conversationsthat you ever had before. But the second thing you do, you have to go out aloneinto the wilderness. You go out into that place where there's nobody there toperform, and the ego has nothing to do, and it crumbles, and only then are youcapable of being loved. I have a friend who said that when her daughter wasborn, she realized that she loved her more than evolution required.
那么我們應該怎么辦呢?第一件事是,讓自己 全身投入于朋友之間,與他們進行從未有過的深層交談。第二件事有些不同,你需要獨自融入大自然。你需要去到一個地方, 在那兒沒有任何人會是你的觀眾,在這里你的自尊心 毫無用處并逐漸粉碎,只有那時,你才可以被愛。我有一個朋友告訴我, 當她女兒出生時,她意識到,她愛女兒多過于進化所需。
07:13
(Laughter)
07:14
And I've always loved that.
我太喜歡這句話了。
07:15
(Applause)
07:17
Because it talks about the peace that's atthe deep of ourself, our inexplicable care for one another. And when you touchthat spot, you're ready to be rescued. The hard thing about when you're in thevalley is that you can't climb out; somebody has to reach in and pull you out.It happened to me. I got, luckily, invited over to a house by a couple namedKathy and David, and they were -- They had a kid in the DC public school, hisname's Santi. Santi had a friend who needed a place to stay because his mom hadsome health issues. And then that kid had a friend and that kid had a friend.When I went to their house six years ago, I walk in the door, there's like 25around the kitchen table, a whole bunch sleeping downstairs in the basement. Ireach out to introduce myself to a kid, and he says, "We don't reallyshake hands here. We just hug here." And I'm not the huggiest guy on theface of the earth, but I've been going back to that home every Thursday nightwhen I'm in town, and just hugging all those kids. They demand intimacy. Theydemand that you behave in a way where you're showing all the way up. And theyteach you a new way to live, which is the cure for all the ills of our culturewhich is a way of direct -- really putting relationship first, not just as aword, but as a reality.
因為它講述的是我們 內心深處的平靜,我們對彼此難以言述的關心。當你觸及那個層次, 你就可以被救贖了。當你處在低谷中時,最難的事莫過于無法獨自爬出這個低洼;有人需要伸出援手,將你拉出。這也發(fā)生在了我身上。我有幸被凱茜和大衛(wèi)夫婦邀請去他們家。他們的孩子桑提在 華盛頓的公立學校讀書。桑提的一個朋友 需要找個地方住,因為他的媽媽有些健康問題。而那個朋友也認識個 需要幫助的朋友,以此類推。當我去到他們家做客時,我走進門,餐桌旁 坐著二十五個人,還有一些正在地下室睡著。我正要向一個孩子做自我介紹,他說道, “我們這兒可不流行握手,抱一個吧?!拔译m不是地球上 最喜歡擁抱的人,但有著什么一直吸引著我,在每周四去到他們家時,與這些孩子一個個擁抱問好。他們想與你親密無間。他們需要你完全放開自我。他們教會你一種全新的生活方式,可以治愈所有文化之殤,這其實很簡單,就是將 人際關系放在第一位,并非空談,而要實踐。
08:29
And the beautiful thing is, thesecommunities are everywhere. I started something at the Aspen Institute called"Weave: The Social Fabric." This is our logo here. And we plop into aplace and we find weavers anywhere, everywhere. We find people like Asiaha Butler,who grew up in -- who lived in Chicago, in Englewood, in a tough neighborhood.And she was about to move because it was so dangerous, and she looked acrossthe street and she saw two little girls playing in an empty lot with brokenbottles, and she turned to her husband and she said, "We're not leaving.We're not going to be just another family that abandon that." And sheGoogled "volunteer in Englewood," and now she runs R.A.G.E., the bigcommunity organization there.
而最美好之處就是, 這種團體無處不在。我在阿斯彭研究所建立了 “織:社會之網”。這是我們的標志。我們發(fā)現身邊有很多織網者。像是艾依莎·巴特勒 --她居住在芝加哥的英格伍德, 那是一個危險的街區(qū)。因為身處危險地段, 她正想要搬家,但她看到路對邊,有兩個小女孩在空停車場里玩碎瓶子。她轉頭和她丈夫說, “我們不搬了。我們不能像其他家庭那樣 一走了之,丟下這里不管?!彼R上搜索了“英格伍德志愿者”, 現在她管理著“R.A.G.E”,那里最大的社區(qū)組織。
09:08
Some of these people have had tough valleys.I met a woman named Sarah in Ohio who came home from an antiquing trip andfound that her husband had killed himself and their two kids. She now runs afree pharmacy, she volunteers in the community, she helps women cope withviolence, she teaches. She told me, "I grew from this experience because Iwas angry. I was going to fight back against what he tried to do to me bymaking a difference in the world. See, he didn't kill me. My response to himis, 'Whatever you meant to do to me, screw you, you're not going to doit.'"
很多人都經歷過人生的低谷。我遇見一個叫莎拉的女士, 她在一段古董之旅結束回家后,發(fā)現她丈夫殺了她的 兩個孩子后自殺了。她現在管理一所免費藥房,在社區(qū)里積極做志愿工作,幫助并教其他女性處理暴力事件,“我能從這段經歷里成長,是因為我很憤怒”,她說,“我要反擊并通過改變這個世界來向他宣戰(zhàn)。他沒能殺了我。我想對他說,‘無論你怎樣試圖傷害我, 去你的,你就是不行。' "
09:42
These weavers are not living anindividualistic life, they're living a relationist life, they have a differentset of values. They have moral motivations. They have vocational certitude,they have planted themselves down. I met a guy in Youngstown, Ohio, who justheld up a sign in the town square, "Defend Youngstown." They haveradical mutuality, and they are geniuses at relationship.
這些織網者都不以 個人主義的方式生活,他們重視人際關系, 有一套不同的價值觀。他們充滿道德積極性。他們愿意發(fā)聲, 他們平易近人。我曾在俄亥俄州的 揚斯敦遇見一個人,他當時在鎮(zhèn)中心舉著一塊牌子,上面寫著:“捍衛(wèi)揚斯敦”。他們有著超前的集體感,他們是人際關系方面天才。
10:03
There's a woman named Mary Gordon who runssomething called Roots of Empathy. And what they do is they take a bunch ofkids, an eighth grade class, they put a mom and an infant, and then thestudents have to guess what the infant is thinking, to teach empathy. There wasone kid in a class who was bigger than the rest because he'd been held back,been through the foster care system, seen his mom get killed. And he wanted tohold the baby. And the mom was nervous because he looked big and scary. But shelet this kid, Darren, hold the baby. He held it, and he was great with it. Hegave the baby back and started asking questions about parenthood. And his finalquestion was, "If nobody has ever loved you, do you think you can be agood father?" And so what Roots of Empathy does is they reach down andthey grab people out of the valley. And that's what weavers are doing.
有一位叫瑪麗·戈登的女士運營著“同理心種子計劃”。他們聚集一群八年級的孩子,找到一對母嬰,并讓這些學生猜 嬰兒在想些什么,由此來培養(yǎng)他們的同理心。課上有一個孩子, 看起來比其他人都要大,他留了幾級并且 一直住在寄養(yǎng)家庭,他親眼目睹了他母親被殺。他想要抱抱這個嬰兒。那個媽媽有些緊張,因為男孩 人高馬大,有些嚇人。但她仍讓這個名叫 達倫的男孩抱了嬰兒。他抱著小孩,做得特別棒。他把孩子遞還給了媽媽, 開始問有關當父母的問題。他最后的問題是,“若從沒有人愛過你, 你還可能成為一個好父親嗎?”這就是“同理心種子計劃”的力量,他們伸出援手,將人拉出低谷。這也是織網者所做的。
10:53
Some of them switch jobs. Some of them stayin their same jobs. But one thing is, they have an intensity to them. I readthis -- E.O. Wilson wrote a great book called "Naturalist," about hischildhood. When he was seven, his parents were divorcing. And they sent him toParadise Beach in North Florida. And he'd never seen the ocean before. And he'dnever seen a jellyfish before. He wrote, "The creature was astonishing. Itexisted beyond my imagination." He was sitting on the dock one day and hesaw a stingray float beneath his feet. And at that moment, a naturalist was bornin the awe and wonder. And he makes this observation: that when you're a child,you see animals at twice the size as you do as an adult. And that has alwaysimpressed me, because what we want as kids is that moral intensity, to betotally given ourselves over to something and to find that level of vocation.And when you are around these weavers, they see other people at twice the sizeas normal people. They see deeper into them. And what they see is joy.
他們中的一些人換了工作。另一些會待在同一個崗位上。但他們都有著同樣的熱情。我正在讀 --E·O·威爾森寫的一本關于 他童年的書,叫《自然主義者》。他七歲時,他的父母要離婚。他們把他送到 北佛羅里達的天堂灘。他從未見過海洋。沒見過水母。他寫道: “這種生物太驚奇了。 它存在于我想象力之外”。有天,他坐在碼頭上,看到一條魟魚在他腳下游過。那一刻,在敬畏和驚奇中, 一個自然主義者誕生了。他發(fā)現,當你是個孩子時,會把動物看作 大人眼中兩倍大。這打動了我,因為我們所需的正是 孩子所有的強烈道德感,讓我們完全臣服于某物,找到那種使命感。當你身邊圍繞著這些織網者時,他們會將別人看作兩倍大,他們看人更深,他們看到樂趣。
12:05
On the first mountain of our life, whenwe're shooting for our career, we shoot for happiness. And happiness is good,it's the expansion of self. You win a victory, you get a promotion, your teamwins the Super Bowl, you're happy. Joy is not the expansion of self, it's thedissolving of self. It's the moment when the skin barrier disappears between amother and her child, it's the moment when a naturalist feels just free innature. It's the moment where you're so lost in your work or a cause, you havetotally self-forgotten. And joy is a better thing to aim for than happiness.
在人生第一座大山上, 我們的事業(yè)剛剛起步時,我們追逐的是幸福感。幸福感是不錯, 它是自我的膨脹。你贏了一場戰(zhàn)役,你升職了,你的隊伍 贏得了超級碗,你很開心。但樂趣不是自我膨脹, 而是自我溶解。樂趣存在于母親和她孩子之間再無肌膚之隔時,樂趣會在一個自然主義者 在大自然中放飛自我時出現。當你完全沉浸在工作和事業(yè)中,樂趣會在你忘乎自我時找到你。尋找樂趣比追逐幸福更好。
12:43
I collect passages of joy, of people whenthey lose it. One of my favorite is from Zadie Smith. In 1999, she was in aLondon nightclub, looking for her friends, wondering where her handbag was. Andsuddenly, as she writes, "... a rail-thin man with enormous eyes reachedacross a sea of bodies for my hand. He kept asking me the same thing over andover, 'Are you feeling it?' My ridiculous heels were killing me, I wasterrified that I might die, yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with delightthat 'Can I Kick It?' should happen to be playing on this precise moment in thehistory of the world on the sound system, and it was now morphing into 'TeenSpirit.' I took the man's hand, the top of my head blew away, we danced, wedanced, we gave ourselves up to joy."
我一直在收集人們 描寫樂趣的文字。其中我最喜歡的是 扎迪·史密斯寫的一段。1999年,她在倫敦的一家夜店,她一邊尋找她的的朋友, 一邊在找自己的手袋。她寫道,“突然間,一個有著大眼睛的精瘦男人越過人海,向我伸出手。他一遍遍地問我同一個問題, ‘你感受到了嗎?’我正受著高跟鞋的折磨, 擔心著我的人身安全,但同時,我心中充滿了喜悅,因為 ‘Can I Kick It?’ 這首歌正好在人類歷史的 這個特定時刻在這家夜店的音響中播出,現在,正慢慢漸進到 ‘Teen Spirit’ 這首歌。我握住了那個男人的手, 我完全被震住了,我們不停地跳著舞,無比快樂”。