Coffee, Tea英语演讲稿
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. After listening to so many speeches, are you feeling a little thirsty?
So would you fancy a drink?
I know some of you prefer coffee. However, I like tea better. So we have different preferences. Don’t worry, that doesn’t mean that we are enemies.
Just like some of you, one of my friends likes coffee very much. He’s a columnist who writes articles for newspaper. Because of his occupation, he always has to work at midnight. Thus, coffee becomes his close “soul mate”. He gradually gets addicted to it while I still love drinking tea.
Why do people have different preferences and tastes? I think that’s because everyone is unique. Different people are born in different families, accept different education and experience different things in life. In other words, every subtle difference makes a person unique. That’s why the world is so colorful. That’s why life is so wonderful. That’s why we love to travel, to make friends. Imagine a world where everybody has the same face and shares the same habits. Every time you looked at your friends, it would feel like looking into a mirror. People would just be like machines, doing the same thing at the same time.
Just as I said, every subtle difference makes a person unique. So we have thousands of standards to divide people into groups. But one group should not be against another. For example, men and women. In Holy Bible, Adam said, “this is now the bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. She shall be called ‘woman’ for she was taken out of a man.” For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
From the word “united” we can see that God created men and women not to separate them. On the contrary, God intended to make people closer to each other.
However, there are still some differences which can cause conflicts, nationality, for example. There are countless wars in history. Most of them were because that countries fought for their own benefits. Millions of people died for nothing but their nationalities. I believe many of you have watched the movie English Patient. Count Almasy could not save Katherine’s life just because he had a German name. He was taken as a German spy. The story was completely a tragedy, but think about it, how ridiculous it is that people have to kill each other for their nationalities.
You might say that it can only happen in the old times, the war time, but nowadays the conflicts can be more fierce and the causes can be more ridiculous. People throw stones and glass bottles at each other because they support different football teams.
Yesterday people fought for nationalities, today people fight for football teams, who knows what people will fight for tomorrow? Maybe coffee and tea.
The most amazing thing in the world is difference. It makes world beautiful but it also makes the world bloody and nasty. I hope in the future, there will be no prejudice, no hatred. You love your coffee, I love my tea, and we are still friends, never enemies.
Coffee, Tea
张允宜
One of my friends used to tell me about a girl he once met on a train tour. She was an art student majoring in traditional Chinese painting. Every day she woke up with the sun, took a bath, poured a cup of tea for herself and then began to paint. She never used computers or mobile phones. My friend’s life back then seemed to be a remarkable contrast. He was a researcher at Microsoft. With instant coffee he began his day and spent the rest of the morning writing code. At that time, he admitted, he was touched by another life style and therefore started to reflect on his own. He categorized the two as tea and coffee. He said when he was all logic about his obligations and had to use caffeine to stay focused, he finally learned another possibility, a possibility that enables you to live artistically, but a possibility that most of us are never able to reach.
There indeed are moments when we stop to look at what we have and become jealous of those who are brave enough to go after an idyllic life. Like Henry David Thoreau, by his reclusive living at the Walden he fronted only the essential facts of life, declared of independence and simplicity. We at occasions wish we had the same courage. But we don’t. Because we are at the same time jealous of those who live with a sense of self-fulfillment as their life is so organized that it appears to be flawless as well. We enjoy the “coffee” side too.
The dilemma is that we keep telling ourselves we cannot have them both. But the fact is, for most of the times, we are puzzled by choices that we don’t have to make. Living deep does not mean a conflict with realism. Thoreau himself could manage to be an individualist anarchist on his voyage of spiritual discovery, and Adam Smith used to lecture us on how happiness originates from inner peace. Just think of the taste of the Green Tea Latte at Starbucks, mixed with the fragrance of tea and the delightful bitterness of coffee. This is the smell of life.
Life is never a question of coffee or tea. It is an exploration of coffee and tea. The difference is made when you spare a second for introspection and link the two of them. Werner Heisenberg spent a summer in his youths in the Southern German villages and after viewing the picturesque scenery he depicted himself as not willing to look at physics for even another glance. However, later, when he was devoted again to laboratory, he claimed that he had found the unity of science and nature. This is the Eureka moment. Sooner or later it comes into our own lives too to teach us about the harmony of coffee and tea. As Jorges Luis Borges would say, for a genuine poet, every facet of the diamond of life is shining, for art is its heart.
That friend of mine has now put his programmer days behind. Although late in the night when I pass his office the light might still be on, I am glad to hear new stories from him about discoveries on a lately opened café or a thought-provoking movie. I guess we have finally learned that life is sometimes like a cup of coffee. It is too hard to live to abstract ideals. And sometimes it is like a cup of tea, inspiring you to suck out the marrow of it. And we know that either coffee or tea needs to be exquisitely brewed. That is, after all, how we live in the world and of the world.
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