I was born legally blind. Of all the stories of my early childhood, the one about a _________ is my mother’s favorite. 

I was only two when the _________ occurred. We had just arrived home from a trip. Mom lifted me out of the car and _________ to speak to the driver. I took advantage of my brief _________ to dash across the lawn (草坪)—and hit a large maple tree! I was running so fast that I bounced off the trunk and _________ on my backside. Mom expected me to start crying, but I just sat there for a minute. Then I _________ myself up and kept right on going. Mom always adds here that, as many times as I _________ across the lawn after that, I never again crashed into that tree.

Mom loves to use this story as an _________. It reminds her that children don’t enter life afraid to take risks or unwilling to _________ again when they fall down. She never wanted me to lose that __________ as I grew older. When I __________ my major life decisions, I was still that little girl tearing full-speed across the lawn. I studied abroad and later moved away from my parents’ home to look for a __________. Through years of __________, I have become a respected teacher in a school serving high-need students.

We are almost certain to get __________ at some point during the process of achieving our goal. When that happens, don’t sit in the grass and __________. Just get up and keep on going. It will all be worth it in the end.

This week, I will hike along the Appalachian Trail alone to look for what can be hard to find in the city: solitude. In the _________, I can find places to be alone, but it is much harder to find true solitude. The _________ between cities and mountains is the secret I find that the _________ comforts.

For many people, the idea of being alone in mountains can be _________. It’s understandable because we are, _________, social animals. But being in the wild without others doesn’t mean being _________. In fact, it can be quite the _________. Life is there already. There are the bird calls in the air and frogs crossing the trail.

And there is more.

When you come to a(n) _________ where the sunlight makes it to the forest floor, you can sometimes catch a hint of something. I don’t know what to call it. Words _________. But it feels something like a root or a(n) ____________ song of the world’s own presence.

If that moment is just between you and the wild world, then you are ____________ indeed. That is when you can ____________ what Henry David Thoreau meant when he said, “I never found the ____________ that was so companionable as solitude.”

So, as the great John Muir ____________ it: “Keep close to Nature’s heart once in a while, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the wild to wash your ____________ clean.”

I always carry a Rubik’s Cube (魔方) in my backpack. Solving it quickly is a start of a(n) _________. I’ve been asked to solve the cube on the subway of New York and at a cafe in Paris. And learning to solve it is a start to _________ the biggest problem of my life.

Holding a Cube, people usually don’t know where to begin. That’s _________ what it was like for me to learn how to read. Letters and words were out of order and mixed together. Nothing made _________ because I’m dyslexic (阅读困难的). It’s _________ to admit this, but I still couldn’t make a consistent spelling of my full name when I had to leave public school after the fourth grade.

It was at that time that I taught myself to solve the cube, which made me _________ that sometimes you have to take a few steps back in order to move _________. This was a _________ of my own life. As a fifth-grader at a new school that is especially founded for those who have language-processing disorder, I had to _________ from memorizing symbols for letters. I spent another four years learning how to learn and finding __________ that allowed me to return to my district’s normal public school with the ability to express my ideas.

The Rubik’s Cube taught me that to__________ something big, it helps to __________ the big matter into smaller pieces. Things can often look like an unreasonable mess before you suddenly hit upon a way to untangle the mess. I believe that there are surprises around the corner. Like a(n) __________ text or sometimes like life itself, the Rubik’s Cube can be a frustrating puzzle. So I carry one in my backpack to __________ myself that I can attain my goals, __________ what obstacle I may face.