有哪些小事可以彻底改变生活

He gave me a chunk of glass.

他给我一块玻璃。

My husband was killed on 9/11; he worked in 1 WTC, well above the impact floors. On his birthday in March, 2002, I went to the site that used to be the WTC. It wasn’t cleaned up yet, in fact it was ugly as hell and smelled about the same, and access was still pretty chaotic. I got to the Century 21 department store across the street, and stood against the wall - and just crumbled. Broke down.

我丈夫死于911事件，他在世贸中心一号楼工作，就在被撞击楼层上面。2002年3月他生日时，我去了世贸中心旧址，那里还没有被清理干净，看起来闻起来就像地狱一般，通往那儿的道路也一片混乱，我去了马路对面的21世纪百货商店，靠墙站着，心都要碎了，我要崩溃了。

A guy who was working across the street at the site - which was still a full-on disaster area - saw me and came across. “Who did you lose?” he asked. “My husband,” I said, through ugly tears, and I told the guy what firm my husband had worked for, and that it was his birthday.

马路对面当时完全就是灾难现场，一个工作人员看见我了就走过来问我：“你失去什么亲人了？”我说：“我丈夫”，我哭得很难看，跟他说我丈夫之前在哪个公司工作，那天是他的生日。

Guy turned out to be a firefighter. Reached into his front pocket. “This is actually really rare. Not a lot of glass survived; it just vaporized.” And he pressed it into my hand.

那个人是消防员，他把手伸进衣服前面口袋里，把一块玻璃放进我手里说：“这块真的很少见，大部分玻璃都没了，熔化掉了。”

I still have it. It’s not that the guy was giving up a valuable souvenir. It was that he was acknowledging my connection to that little piece of glass, and putting it where he thought it belonged - that, and he needed to give me something that in some small way I could hold onto and focus on, instead of the hurt. This was how he could do that in that one moment.

我现在仍然留着它，不是因为那个男人放弃了一个有价值的纪念品，而是因为他明白我和这一小块玻璃之间的联系，把它放到一个他认为这块玻璃该去的地方。他需要把这个东西给我，让我能握在手里或多或少把注意力转移到这上面，而不是整日悲伤。这就是当时他所能做的。

I was so bound up in my own head I never even asked his name; he didn’t ask mine either. If he’s out there now, I want to tell him that the little piece of glass made me start to think that maybe everything wasn’t transient, ephemeral - that maybe there were things, little things, short moments, small pieces, that last no matter what.

我当时思想都集中在这个东西上，甚至都没问他的名字，他也没问我的名字。如果他现在还在那儿，我想告诉他这一小块玻璃使我开始思考，可能不是所有东西都是转瞬即逝的，可能还有一些东西虽小虽短暂，但不管在什么情况下都能延续下去。

I want to say to him: thanks for that.

我想对他说：谢谢他的赠品。