Every so often, someone so young does something so amazing that you can't help but wonder how he manages it. That's what happened the first time we heard Matthew Whitaker play the piano. Matthew is a jazz pianist who is blind, and since the age of 11, he's been performing around the world.

Matthew Whitaker was born 16 weeks earlier. He weighed 1 pound and 11 ounces. His parents were told he had less than a 50 % chance of survival. One of the many complications（并发症）he faced was a disease which led to blindness.

No one in Matthew's family was a musician, but his grandfather bought him his first keyboard when he was 3 years old. It didn't take long for Matthew to show that he had a gift. So the Whitakers decided to get Matthew a teacher, which proved to be difficult. “At the time, we got a lot of answers that he's too young and they don't know how to teach a blind child,” Moses Whitaker said. “He was 3 years old at the time.”

Finally, Dalia Sakas agreed to meet Matthew. Dalia is the director of music studies at a music school in New York City, a school for the visually impaired. To her surprise, Matthew could listen to a piece of music once and then play it. “Because it is rare to meet someone of this talent. He's obviously, you know, got something to offer to the world and so you want to make that possible.”

She did. Matthew has played in more than 200 clubs and concert halls around the world. His love of music has never been in doubt. Matthew's latest album is called Now Hear This. One critic noted that it sounded like Matthew was playing with six hands.

As a student, I heard the line “graduate school is stressful” so many times that it began to bear no meaning:

Sure, there were campus resources that encouraged healthy behaviors, including deep thought, and the benefits of self-care, but self-care sounded expensive and time-consuming to me; I had work to do. And I was not a fan of deep thought: The thought of sitting still for 30 minutes only caused me greater stress. But one thing I couldn’t stay away from was walking my dog.

Tessa is a six-year-old lovely coonhound that I got as a gift to myself, for completing my undergraduate degree at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. I first saw Tessa as a thin and little dog in a photo on the Internet. She was found, huddled up with her friends, in a deserted house in Alabama.

Because of Tessa, I took frequent walking breaks while studying for a master’s degree in public health at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. I discovered the best corners and crannies on campus, including the sloping grass land behind the school, filled with squirrels and sticks — a safe place for dogs. I found a tree accidentally with a swing, overlooking the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, which offered the best sunset view in town. On our daily walks, I found calm in the woods and quiet in the early morning enveloping the city streets.

Now, as I work from home, Tessa continues to help me deal with a lonely existence. Just like in graduate school, she demands that I stop working, however briefly, and accompany her on a walk. These forced breaks throughout the day take me away from my computer and help me to stay active, greet my neighbors and come back to work refreshed. And although I certainly haven’t escaped from stress, and I am still trying to find my footing in research, I will continue to make time for walks every day. I recommend it very much.

Editors of newspapers and magazines often go to extremes to provide their reader with unimportant facts and statistics. Last year a journalist had been instructed by a well-known magazine to write an article on the president’s palace in a new African republic. When the article arrived, the editor read the first sentence and then refuse to publish it. The article began: “Hundreds of steps lead to the high wall which surrounds the president’s palace”. The editor at once sent the journalist a fax instructing him to find out the exact number of steps and the height of the wall.

The journalist immediately set out to obtain these important facts, but the took a long time to send them. Meanwhile, the editor was getting impatient, for the magazine would soon go to press. He sent the journalist two more faxes, but received no reply. He sent yet another fax informing the journalist that if he did not reply soon he would be fired. When the journalist again failed to reply, the editor reluctantly published the article as it had originally been written. A week later, the editor at last received a fax from the journalist. Not only had the poor man been arrested, but he had been sent to prison as well. However, he had at last been allowed to send a fax in which he informed the editor that the he had been arrested while counting the 1,084 steps leading to the fifteen-foot wall which surrounded the president’s palace.