A Word That Has Changed the World

——Passion, your inner fire

Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s my honor to be here today to give you this speech.

When I learned the topic of our speech, a remark made by Steve Jobs, the Chief Executive of Apple Company occurred to my mind. The remark is "we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better." And it is this competition that lets me think about the role passion has played throughout our lives and what passion means to the world. Yes, I believe people with passion can change the world!

Lost in my mind, I see the passion from Martin Luther King has finally helped them win the racial discrimination struggle. The passion led them out of dark. And Van Gogh, a talented yet unfortunate painter, strikes people all over the world with sadness, sympathy and hope expressed uniquely in his works, and more importantly, his great passion about his career and life. Moreover, I see, American president Barack Obama awoke his people’s hope by his passionate speech and attitude, lighting the road during the financial crisis. It is his words “Yes, we can!” that shows the whole world his passion and inspired his whole country. They did have changed the world by their passion!

Passion is in all of us, and undeniably part of who we are. Passion then, if one can find it within themselves as well as within the world around them, can offer the meaning that so many people feel is lacking in their lives.

I’m a rather shy person by nature who easily suffers from stage fright. In fact, I could have stayed away and had an easy time. But my passion for life made me accept the challenge. Now here I am. Even if my performance isn’t very good, I will not call my attempt a failure. Instead, I’ll celebrate it as a true success. Because part of my goal is my own character training-to do more assertive, to be brave in face of difficulties. Every try is a meaningful step forward, small as it is, in the long journey toward the final success in my life.

Passion has changed me. As long as it can change a person, it will change the world, since everyone makes a difference.

Passion is the fire in your heart. You, my friend, also has this passion within you. It "whispers" to you occasionally, but in some cases it cries out. It cries out to be listened to and acted upon.

Find your inner fire, and live that passion daily. You will be changed, everyone will be changed, I believe, then, the whole world will be changed!

Thank you.

 

第二篇：My passion

My passion

I have a very pedestrian passion. I love to walk. With each passing year, I become more committed to going about my life on foot. I don't do it for the exercise, though I'm glad for that, and I don't do it to conserve fossil fuels, though conserving them is a good idea. The kind of walking I most enjoy has nothing to do with what people call hiking, and it doesn't require special shoes. Nor am I looking for solitude. Writers get enough of that staring at all those blank pages. Filling them up is lonely work. No, I simply walk to the local deli for my morning coffee and newspaper, to the post office to drop off the mail, to the bookstore, to the local market, to the movie theater, to in-town bars and restaurants. When I can talk my wife into it, we go for long walks, not along the rocky Maine shoreline, which is beautiful, but rather, along our hilly streets all the way out to the cemetery and (so far, at least) back again. For me, it's more a question of speed than of destination. "Our senses…were developed to function at foot speed," Wendell Berry has written. "The faster one goes, the more strain there is on the senses, the more they fail to take in, the more confusion they must tolerate or gloss over."

He's right, of course. Children know, then in adolescence forget, that it's far more rewarding to go slow through the world, not necessarily to smell the roses but to watch worms writhe in puddles. The house I grew up in, in Gloversville, New York, was three blocks from the neighborhood elementary school. This was during the '50s, and our parents saw no reason why kids shouldn't walk to and from. Had we gone straight to school as instructed, our journey, door-to-door, would have taken five minutes, ten tops. The more crooked and exciting route was through our neighbors' backyards, where we climbed their fences, leapt off the roofs of their teetering sheds (the heights of these seemed dizzying at the time), admired their new barbecue grills. During this daily journey, which took about half an hour, we ruined our shoes, tore holes in the knees of brand-new pants, were shouted at by angry middle-aged women in powder blue bathrobes and then chased by dogs with ropes of spit swinging from unhinged jaws. We learned that people behave differently on their

back porches than they do on their front ones, and that back-porch behavior is generally more interesting. We saw no reason not to share the bounty of our neighbors' fruit trees, and we investigated with genuine curiosity what was underneath their garages. We arrived at school full of stories-of who had fallen hard on the ice at Sargent's Hill, of the cool (and lethal)

Viking-sword-shaped piece of fiberglass discovered on the scrap heap out back of the machine shop, of the big bottles of dusty off-brand soda discovered at the very bottom of the cooler out back of Charlie Drake's corner store, soda he'd sell for the same price (amazing!) as a much smaller Pepsi.

Walking, I've come to believe, leads naturally to stories. People encountered randomly on the sidewalk have different things to communicate than do those same people met by design at a bar or coffee shop, where they tell you things they've planned to tell you (front-porch stuff, usually). And at foot speed, we notice different things than we do from a car, even one driven at village speed limits. In summer, afoot, you hear late-afternoon laughter from the unseen back deck and imagine the company gathered there (the cars out front all sport out-of-state plates), the bottle of chilled white wine sweating on the picnic table. Between houses you notice a small boy with a baseball mitt on one hand sitting all by himself on a motionless swing. Across the street, somebody is doing a forced march of piano scales by an open window. All the stories wait to be written. To walk is to understand a paradox: Though it takes longer to get places on foot, we're less likely to feel as if we've wasted time than if we drove. It's the difference between spending time and wasting it.