There is such a sentence in the movie "The Shawshank Redemption":
Some birds are not destined to be kept in cages, and every feather of them shines with the brilliance of freedom. ”
Tara Westover is one such bird.
Born in Idaho, USA, she never left the mountains before the age of 16, let alone went to school.
She spent her childhood dismantling waste from her father's garbage dump or following her mother around delivering babies.
At the age of seventeen, she was admitted to Brigham Young University through self-study, and finally walked out of that mountain.
After that, she obtained a doctorate from Cambridge University step by step through her own efforts and saw the bigger world.
After graduating, she wrote her story into a novel:
"You shall fly like a bird to your mountain".
This novel has only been on the New York Times bestseller list for only one week, with a comprehensive evaluation of 8.7 points by more than 140,000 people on Douban.
After reading this novel, in addition to being moved by the author's life story of hard work, it also made me understand better:
A person's insight determines his vision and heart.
The wider your knowledge and the wider your horizons, the wider the world.
The wider your knowledge and the wider your heart, the more open your life will be.
Seeing two words has influenced our whole life and deserves to be collected by everyone.
The world as others see it is not your knowledge
Tara's father ran a scrapyard and her mother was a midwife and herbalist.
The family lives at the foot of Buck Peak, the youngest of seven siblings.
She and her siblings never went to school and grew up helping out in her father's scrapyard.
Most of them were born in their own families and did not have birth certificates. Even when they are sick, they do not go to the hospital and only rely on the herbs prepared by their mothers for treatment.
Before the age of sixteen, Tara had never stepped out of Buck Peak, wandering the mountains like a wild man.
She always thought that she would live here for the rest of her life, get married, have children, and become a midwife like her mother.
Everything she knew came from her crazy Mormon family.
Her paranoid father told her:
Schools are tools for government brainwashing;
Medical treatment is an act of rebellion against God;
A decent woman can never show above her ankles;
The end of the world is just around the corner, and food needs to be stocked up all the time.
When the third brother, Taylor, decides to leave home and go to school, Tara begins to realize that there is a world beyond the mountain.
It wasn't until she walked out of the mountains at the age of seventeen that she saw the world as it really was and had her own insight.
She finally knew how strange the family in the mountains was.
Sitting in the well and watching the sky, there is only one hole.
Climbing the mountain and looking far away, you know that there is a sky outside the sky.
Trapped in a crazy original family, he can't understand normal life after all.
Imprisoned in the mountains, he is never able to understand the outside world.
When you are less knowledgeable, the sound around you is always the highest.
Those sounds create a patio that makes you feel like the world is no different.
However, the world in the eyes of others is not your knowledge.
Zhou Guoping said:
Everyone has their eyes open, but it doesn't mean that everyone is looking at the world.
Many people hardly use their own eyes to see, they only listen to what others say, and the world they see is always what others say.
Only by seeing through one's own eyes and experiencing it with one's own heart can one have one's own insight.
True insight comes from practice and thinking
With the encouragement of her older brother Taylor, Tara finally decided to realize her musical dreams by taking the university entrance examination.
After guerrilla warfare studies, she finally got an admission letter from Brigham Young University.
The challenge begins when you walk into the campus.
The hustle and bustle of the city "noise" tormented her ears, and the "exposed" outfits of her roommates tormented her inside.
She didn't know what a thesis was, what history was, and she didn't know how to use a textbook to review before an exam.
As information continues to enter, Tara gradually feels her ignorance.
It was difficult for her to finish her studies, but she didn't give up.
She began to tug at her hair and meditate on her textbook, studying until two or three o'clock in the morning every night.
She began to learn to get along with her roommates, accepted a bursary from the church, went to the hospital to have her teeth treated, dressed herself carefully, and met her boyfriend who fell in love at first sight.
She felt that she was turning her back on her family, but she could not hide her suspicions about her father:
The school did not control her words and actions, the hospital did not poison her, and it was normal for girls to wear camisoles.
After consulting with specialists, she gradually understood that her father may not be lying, but he suffers from schizophrenia.
Tara learns about the outside world through reading and builds her own perception.
She began to wake up from her father's wishes to find her desires:
Live a normal life.
Yu Minhong said:
Get out there and pursue an unknown world.
If you don't step out of the familiar world, you will never have a new life.
The process of exploring the unknown world is the best way for you to give your name to the future.
Exploration means continuous practice. Only by doing it in a down-to-earth manner can the dream come true.
Exploration is about thinking. Thinking with full attention, it is possible to solve the confusion.
In the river of life, thinking as an oar, practicing as a boat, and experiencing the baptism of wind and waves, can we go further and more steadily.
Only by constantly thinking and practicing can we precipitate our own insights and draw our own choices and judgments.
How far you can go ultimately depends on insight
Tara came to Brigham Young to study music and hope to conduct a church choir in the future.
But after reading a lot of books, she felt that she liked Jewish history more.
With Professor Kerry's help, Tara was offered the opportunity to study abroad at Cambridge University.
When she entered Cambridge, she read her favorite books to her heart's content and revised her dissertation according to her supervisor's guidance.
Every moment her eyes were open, she was either reading or thinking about the words.
After reading her history paper, her supervisor told her that it was one of the best papers she had read in her thirty years of teaching at Cambridge, and invited her to apply for graduate studies at Cambridge or Harvard.
Tara felt that she was just a poor and inferior girl, and she didn't deserve that kind of school.
Professor Kerry told her:
"The most powerful factor that determines who you are comes from within you. ”
With her hard work as always, she won the "Best Undergraduate Graduate Award" and also won the "Gates Cambridge Scholarship" to become a graduate student at the University of Cambridge.
This time, she finally overcame the psychological barrier given by her original family and completely surrendered herself to the university.
She believes that she can be reinvented and that her mind will change completely.
The pace of struggle has not stopped.
On her twenty-seventh birthday, Tara passed the defence and became a PhD student at the University of Cambridge.
She decided to let it go, accept herself, and no longer haunt the old hatred of her original family.
Wu Jun, vice president of Tencent, once said:
How far a person can go depends on insight.
Only when you have seen the mountains do you know how to look up;
If you have seen the trough, you will not despair.
If you have seen the distance, you will not be confused;
I have seen the darkness and know what light is.
Broad knowledge allows people to read countless worlds, and the broader their horizons, the more they know their own shortcomings.
Lofty insights make people read all kinds of people's hearts, and the more open-minded they are, the more they can feel at ease.
In a person's knowledge, there are questions he has thought about, what he has said, what he has done, and his thinking and practice will permeate his behavior and become a habit.
A person's knowledge hides the books he has read, the roads he has walked, and the people he has met. The horizons and minds that have been expanded by experience temper cognition and judgment.
Habits form character, and you can reinvent yourself.
Experience can be turned into a mind, and mountains and rivers can be accommodated.
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Zeng Guofan said:
Whoever does great things, focuses on knowledge, supplemented by talent;
Where great things are accomplished, people seek to live in half, and providence lives in half.
If there is something in this world that can help us not to panic and be anxious on the road of "doing great things", and truly "not be confused and not trapped in love", that is exactly what we see.
The world in the eyes of others, whether wonderful or desolate, has nothing to do with your growth, because those are not your knowledge.
True insight must be explored and polished by oneself, and it will be born and matured from deep thinking and practice.
Read 10,000 books and travel 10,000 miles.
Your insights determine what your future will look like.
May you have a well-informed life, live a gentle and powerful life, and be able to enjoy the best and accept the worst.