I'm a speaker and give hundreds of speeches every year. I spoke about appreciation last month and I used this quote by Albert Schweitzer: " Sometimes our light goes out but is blown again into flame by meeting with another human being. Each of us should express the deepest thanks to those who have relighted this inner(内心的) light

I asked my audiences to shut their eyes and think about someone who, at some time in their lives, has relighted their inner light. Then I left the room in silence for several minutes. It was always a meaningful experience as they remembered the joy they felt from another person

One day, a gentleman came up to talk with me and thanked me for creating a new awareness(意识)in him. He said he thought of his eighth-grade history teacher because she was everyone's favorite teacher and had truly made a difference in all of their lives. After several days, the gentleman found his history teacher and he wrote to her. The following week he received this letter

Dear John

You will never know how much your letter meant to me. I am 83 years old, and I am living all alone in one room. My friends are all gone. My family’s gone. I taught 50 years and yours is the first "thank you" letter I have ever gotten from a student. Sometimes I wonder what I did with my life. I will read and reread your letter until the day I die

The gentleman was sad, "She is always the one we talk about when we have a get-together. She is everyone's favorite teacher-- we love her! But no one had ever told her until she received my letter.

In 2004, when my daughter Becky was ten, she and my husband, Joe, were united in their desire for a dog. As for me, I shared none of their canine lust.

But why, they pleaded. “Because I don’t have time to take care of a dog.” But we’ll do it. “Really? You’re going to walk the dog? Feed the dog? Bathe the dog?” Yes, yes, and yes. “I don’t believe you.” We will. We promise.

They didn’t. From day two (everyone wanted to walk the cute puppy that first day), neither thought to walk the dog. While I was slow to accept that I would be the one to keep track of her shots, to schedule her vet appointments, to feed and clean her, Misty knew this on day one. As she looked up at the three new humans in her life (small, medium, and large), she calculated, “The medium one is the sucker in the pack.”

Quickly, she and I developed something very similar to a Vulcan mind meld (心灵融合). She’d look at me with those sad brown eyes of hers, beam her need, and then wait, trusting I would understand — which, strangely, I almost always did. In no time, she became my feet as I read, and splaying across my stomach as I watched television.

Even so, part of me continued to resent walking duty. Joe and Becky had promised. Not fair, I’d balk (不心甘情愿地做）silently as she and I walked. “Not fair,” I’d loudly remind anyone within earshot upon our return home.

Then one day — January 1, 2007, to be exact — my husband’s doctor uttered an unthinkable word: leukemia (白血病). With that, I spent eight to ten hours a day with Joe in the hospital, doing anything and everything I could to ease his discomfort. During those six months of hospitalizations, Becky, 12 at the time, adjusted to other adults being in the house when she returned from school. My work colleagues adjusted to my taking off at a moment's notice for medical emergencies. Every part of my life changed; no part of my old routine remained.

Save one: Misty still needed walking. At the beginning, when friends offered to take her through her paces, I declined because I knew they had their own households to deal with.

As the months went by, I began to realize that I actually wanted to walk Misty. The walk in the morning before I headed to the hospital was a quiet, peaceful time to gather my thoughts or to just be before the day's medical drama unfolded. The evening walk was a time to shake off the day's upsets and let the worry tracks in my head go to white noise.

When serious illness visits your household, it's not just your daily routine and your assumptions about the future that are no longer familiar. Pretty much everyone you know acts differently.

Not Misty. Take her for a walk, and she had no interest in Joe's blood counts or bone marrow test results. On the street or in the park, she had only one thing on her mind: squirrels! She was so joyous that even on the worst days, she could make me smile. On a daily basis she reminded me that life goes on.

After Joe died in 2009, Misty slept on his pillow.

I'm grateful—to a point. The truth is, after years of balking, I've come to enjoy my walks with Misty. As I watch her chase after a squirrel, throwing her whole being into the here-and-now of an exercise that has never once ended in victory, she reminds me, too, that no matter how harsh the present or unpredictable the future, there's almost always some measure of joy to be extracted from the moment.

On the night of June seventeenth, happily unaware that I was now less than forty-eight hours from my little “date” with Bryan Smith, I sat down at our dining room table and listed all the questions I wanted to answer, all the points I wanted to address in my book On Writing—A Memoir of the Craft.

On the eighteenth, I wrote the first four pages of the “On Writing” section. That was where my writing still stood in late July, when I decided I’d better get back to work, or at least try.

My wife Tabby is the person in my life who’s most likely to say I’m working too hard, it’s time to slow down, stay away from that disgusting PowerBook for a little while. When I told her on that July morning that I thought I’d better go back to work, I expected a lecture. Instead, she asked me where I wanted to set up.

She thought about it, and said: “I can lay a table for you in the back hall. There are plenty of plugins so you can have your laptop, the little printer, and a fan.” A couple of hours later, she had made me a wonderful little nest there: laptop and printer, my notes, pens, and reference materials… Standing on the corner of the desk was a framed picture of our younger son, which she had taken earlier that summer.

“Is it all right?” she asked.

“It’s wonderful,” I said, and hugged her. It was wonderful. So is she.

That first writing session lasted an hour and forty minutes, by far the longest period I’d spent sitting upright since being struck by Bryan Smith’s car. When it was over, I was sweating and almost too tired to sit up straight in my wheelchair. And the first five hundred words were uniquely terrifying—it was as if I’d never written anything before them in my life. All my old tricks seemed to have deserted me. I stepped from one word to the next like a very old man finding his way across a stream on a winding line of wet stones. There was no inspiration that first afternoon, only a kind of stubborn determination and the hope that things would get better if I kept at it.

There was no breakthrough that afternoon, unless it was the ordinary miracle that comes with any attempt to create something. All I know is that the words started coming a little faster after a while, then a little faster still. My back still hurt, my leg, too, but those hurts began to seem a little farther away. I started to get on top of them. There was no sense of excitement—not that day—but there was a sense of accomplishment that was almost as good.

After that, things can only get better.