One day, when I was working as a psychologist in England, an adolescent boy showed up in my office. It was David. He kept walking up and down restlessly, his face pale, and his hands shaking slightly. His head teacher had referred him to me. “This boy has lost his family,” he wrote, “He is understandably very sad and refuses to talk to others, and I’m very worried about him. Can you help?”

I looked at David and showed him to a chair. How could I help him? There are problems psychology doesn’t have the answer to, and which no words can describe. Sometimes the best thing one can do is to listen openly and sympathetically.

The first two times we met, David didn’t say a word. He sat there, only looking up to look at the children’s drawing on the wall behind me. I suggested we play a game of chess. He nodded. After that he played chess with me every Wednesday afternoon-in complete silence and without looking at me. It’s not easy to cheat in chess, but I admit I made sure David won once or twice.

Usually, he arrived earlier than agreed, took the chess board and pieces from the shelf and began setting them up before I even got a chance to sit down. It seemed as if he enjoyed my company (陪伴). But why did he never look at me?

“Perhaps he simply needs someone to share his pain with,” I thought, “Perhaps he senses that I respect his suffering.” Some months later, when we were playing chess, he looked up at me suddenly.

“It’s your turn,” he said.

After that day, David started talking. He got friends in school and joined a bicycle club. He wrote to me a few times about his biking with some friends, and about his plan to get into university. Now he had really started to live his own life.

Maybe I gave David something. But I also learned that one, without any words, can reach out to another person. All it takes is a hug, a shoulder to cry on, a friendly touch, and an ear that listens.

For many people, finding an unattended wallet filled with £400 in cash would be a source of temptation (诱惑). But the urge would no doubt be greater if you were living on the streets with little food and money. All of this makes the actions of the homeless Tom Smith even more remarkable.

After spotting a wallet on the front seat inside a parked car with its window down, he stood guard in the rain for about two hours waiting for the owner to return. After hours in the cold and wet, he reached inside and pulled the wallet out hoping to find some ID so he could contact the driver, only to find it contained £400 in notes, with another £50 in spare change beside it.

He then took the wallet to a nearby police station after leaving a note behind to let the owner know it was safe. When the car’s owner John Anderson and his colleague Carol Lawrence returned to the car, which was itself worth £35,000——in Glasgow city center, they were shocked to find a policeman standing next to it. The policeman told them what Mr. Smith did and that the wallet was safe.

Mr. Anderson said: “I couldn’t believe that the guy never took a penny. To think he is sleeping on the streets tonight when he could have stolen the money and paid for a place to stay in. He thought about others instead. It’s unbelievable.”

Mr. Smith’s act drew much of the public's attention. He also won praise from social media users after Mr. Anderson posed about the act of kindness on Facebook. Now Mr. Anderson has set up an online campaign to raise money for Mr. Smith and other homeless people in the area, which by yesterday had received £ 8,000. “I think the faith that everyone has shown in him has touched him. People have been approaching him in the street; he’s had job offers and all sorts,” Mr. Anderson commented.

On the morning of June 3, 1944, the day Maureen Flavin Sweeney turned 21, she, as a young worker at Blacksod lighthouse, dispatched a weather report from Blacksod Bay-a bay of the Atlantic Ocean in Erris, forecasting an impending storm from the Atlantic Ocean.

Later that morning she received a phone call from an English woman asking that she “please check…please repeat” the report. Examining the barometer (气压计) again, Maureen confirmed that a storm would indeed hit the English Channel on June 5th. At the time she didn’t know this was the initial date chosen by Allied command (盟军指挥部) for the invasion of Normandy, an operation that required clear skies for air support and calm water to ensure the safety of water-based landing boats. Based on this, US General Dwight D Eisenhower postponed the D-Day landing by 24 hours.

The Sweeney family had been recording the weather every hour throughout the war. They sent their observations to the Irish Met Service in Dublin, which were then forwarded without their knowledge to the headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in England.

This hourly reporting continued until an automatic meteorological (气象的) station was brought into operation in Belmullet in 1956. Only then, in 1956, did Maureen learn about the history-changing. event that their reports had contributed to in 1944.

On June 22, 2021, this 98-year-old Irish woman was presented with an award by the US House of Representatives. “Her skill and professionalism were crucial in ensuring Allied victory, and her spirit will live on for generations to come. While the number of people who died on D-Day was big, it could have been a lot more were it not for the report from her weather station,” wrote Congressman Jack Bergman. Her son, Vincent Sweeney, said his mom was proud of this, but primarily “happy that she got it right”.