2005年10月12日，刊登于青岛早报27版

青岛早报“利文杯”全市大、中、小学生英语作文大赛获奖作品选登

高中组一等奖青岛二中谭潇也（17岁）

Be Good to Life, Be Good to Yourself

Everyday we hustle among skyscrapers, feeling unable to breathe and wondering how we came to be pushed under such pressure. Every moment we bustle in the masses of clicks and files, trying to find answers to countless questions and expecting to know for what we’re struggling with such hardships. The real thing is, from my point of view, that we’ve been wrong to life as well as ourselves by putting on a certain kind of clothes called stress unconsciously.

Are you satisfied with your present situation? Are you confident about your potential ability? Ask not how much you’re still inferior to others, ask how far you have advanced since the last milestone in your life. As the Chinese idiom goes ，“Frequent comparisons with other people will urge you to die.” On this occasion, it is always the stress you impose on yourself that acts as an obstacle on your way to progress. Pick up an optimistic attitude towards life and drop the belief of being a permanent winner against everyone else, since one is not able to go far with heavy loadings, and a wise hiker will never pack with him the routine of others.

Another way to help you relieve yourself is trying to create a harmonious social environment around you, that is, be tolerant and try your best to avoid conflicts. Easy as it seems to be, it can bring good mood to you with every sunrise and let joy accompany you all the day up into dreams, thus dispersing all your worry and anxiety ，which used to work on your nerves day and night. Besides, that also provide you with a chance to talk openly to people who’re willing to share with you the difficulties and duties. After all, one swallow does not make a spring, and one shoulder is too fragile to hold all the stress.

Talking of reducing stress, people will naturally list things like reading, sleeping and even day-dreaming. Those may work, but just temporarily. The most effective and basic method is rooted in our mind, where stress initially comes from. It is no difficult task to release stress from your mind, simply do as the ET in Spielberg’s film puts it, “Be good.” Yes, that’s it. Be good to life and be good to yourself.