To understand their own limited capacity

A Ball to Roll Around
滾球

by Robert G Allman
羅伯特·G·奧爾曼

I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a freight yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I am thirty-two. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what colour red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a calamity can do strange things to people. 
 4歲那年在大西洋城，我從貨場一輛火車上摔下來，頭先著地，于是雙目失明。現在我已經32歲了。我還模糊地記得陽光是多么燦爛，紅色是多么鮮艷。能恢復視覺固然好，但災難也能對人產生奇妙的作用。

It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn' t been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, otherwise. I don' t mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had left.
有一天我突然想到，倘若我不是盲人，我或許不會變得像現在這樣熱愛生活。現在我相信生活，但我不能肯定如果自己是明眼人，會不會像現在這樣深深地相信生活。這并不意味著我寧愿成為盲人，而只是意味著失去視力使我更加珍惜自己其他的能力。

Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was bewildered and afraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me ——a potential to live, you might call it ——which I didn’t see, and they made me want to fight it out with blindness.
我認為，生活要求人不斷地自我調整以適應現實。人愈能及時地進行調整，他的個人世界便愈有意義。調整決非易事。我曾感到茫然害怕，但我很幸運，父母和老師在我身上發現了某種東西——可以稱之為活下去的潛力吧——而我自己卻沒有發現。他們激勵我誓與失明拼搏到底。

The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If I hadn't been able to do that, I would have collapsed and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life . When I say belief in myself I am not talking about simply the kind of self-confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is part of it. But I mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person that somewhere in the sweeping, intricate pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit

All my life I have set ahead of me a series of goals and then tried to reach them, one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good to try for something I knew at the start was wildly out of reach because that only invited the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway but on the average I made progress.
我這一輩子給自己樹立了一系列目標，然后努力去達到，一次一個。我必須了解自己能力有限，若開始就知道某個目標根本達不到卻硬要去實現，那不會有任何好處，因為那只會帶來失敗的苦果。我有時也失敗過，但一般來說總有進步。