In October, I told the eight-year-olds in the religion class I teach in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, about my plan. “I’d like all of you to do extra jobs around the house to earn some money,” I said. “Then we’ll buy food for a Thanksgiving dinner for someone who might not have a nice dinner otherwise.” I hoped they could experience a sense of their own power to effect change.

Early in Thanksgiving week, they arrived in class with their hand-earned money. And now they couldn’t wait to go shopping. At last we headed toward the checkout, pushing a cart filled with turkey and all the decorations. Then someone spotted a“necessity” that sent them racing a pot of chrysanthemums(菊花).

It was more reasonable to use any extra money to buy food. After all, I pronounced, “You can’t eat flowers”. But the children insisted and placed the purple plant into the cart.

An agency had given us the name and address of a needy grandmother who had lived alone for years. Soon we were arriving at her house. Between the laughing and those purple flowers, I wasn’t sure that any lesson about giving and receiving was getting through.

We finally pulled up in front of a small house in the woods. A woman with a tired face came to the door to welcome us. As my little group carried the boxes of food in, she oohed and aahed - much to her visitors’ pleasure. When Amy put the plant on the counter, the woman seemed surprised. She was wishing it was a bag of flour, I thought. The woman told the children about the animals that lived close by. “I share my food with the birds, ”she said.

We returned to the car. As we fastened our seat belts, we could see the kitchen window The woman inside waved goodbye, then turned and walked across the room, past the turkey, straight to the chrysanthemums. She put her face in the plant. When she raised her head, there was a smile on her lips.The children were quiet. In that one brief moment, they had seen for themselves the power they possessed to make another’s life better.

My only child Sam was just 9 when my editor called to offer a popular column spot in our local daily newspaper. “Write about things that typical suburban families can relate to,” said the editor, who couldn’t see me doing the happy dance in my kitchen while we finalized the details over the phone.

At the time, blogging was just a pipe dream. I’d already published articles and personal essays in several national magazines — but my byline (署名) was hardly a household name. A weekly column would change that, at least locally. Before long, I had established a faithful Sunday readership, including a group of admiring fans who would stop to chat at the post office or the supermarket.

“If you’re going to write about me, you had better get it right or don’t publish it,” My son, in grade school at the time, exploded after I wrote about the time I discovered a soda pop can under his bed. The column, which had unkindly trashed the housekeeping habits of little boys, described how I felt when I discovered that one of the pop cans hosted a colony of honeybees. For entertainment value, I’d stretched the facts a bit, implying that my son was keeping the bees as pets.

“I wish you’d quit writing about me,” he shouted, fighting tears as he ran upstairs. “I don’t want to ruin your job, but that’s just how I feel!” He knew he had posed a serious dilemma. The faithful readership had made it clear that the “kid columns” were my best stuff, and they wanted more.

From the start, I avoided hot-button topics (热点话题) in favor of tender family life. I published what most journalists would consider safe or soft material, knowing full well that my son had to face the challenge at school while I hid behind a desk at home.

And so, after our tearful talk, I agreed to a temporary ban on the kid columns. After years of teaching my son the importance of respecting boundaries, I’d finally learned to respect his.

We all have defining moments in our lives ---- meaningful experiences that stand out in our memory. Many of them owe a great deal to chance: a lucky encounter(相遇) with someone who becomes the love of your life. A new teacher who spots a talent you didn’t know you had. These moments seem to be the product of fate or luck. We can’t control them.

But is that true? No necessarily. Defining moments shape our lives, but we don’t have to wait for them to happen. We can be the authors of them. It is possible to create defining moments if we understand more about them. Our research shows that they all share a set of common elements. We start by asking: why do we remember certain experiences and forget others? In the case of big days, such as weddings, the answer is pretty clear----it’s a celebration that is grand in scale and rich in emotion. No surprise that it’s more memorable than a maths lesson. But for other experiences in life ----from holidays to work projects----it’s not so clear why we remember what we do.

Consider an experiment in which participants were asked to submerge(浸入) their hands for 60 seconds in buckets filled with 14℃ water. (Remember 14℃ water feels much colder than 14℃ air.) They were then asked to submerge their hands for 90 seconds instead of 60, but during the final 30 seconds, the water warmed up to 15℃. The participants were then given a choice: would you rather repeat the first trial or the second?

Psychologists have explained the reasons for this puzzling result. When people assess an experience, they tend to forget or ignore its length. Instead, they seem to rate the experience based on two key moments: the best or worst moment, known as the peak, and the ending.

In the participants’ memories, what stood out for them was that the longer trial ended more comfortably than the shorter one. So when we assess our experiences, we don’t average our minute-by-minute feelings. Rather, we tend to remember flagship moments: the peaks, the pits(低谷) and the transitions. What we don’t remember are the bits in between----sometimes there is little to distinguish one week from the next.

Partly this is because there may be only a dozen moments in your life that show who you are----those are big defining moments. But there are smaller experiences, too, in the context of a memorable holiday, romantic date or work achievement. Once we understand how we remember certain moments and why, we can start to create more moments that matter.