What was the best advice you got as a teenager?
—Question asked in the Positive Youth Development Training
Sitting in the old one-room schoolhouse
and trying to remember any piece of advice,
I come up blank, which makes me think brain scientists
are right: the prefrontal cortex had not yet kicked in.
Makes me think, why give a teen advice?
They won’t listen now. They won’t remember it later.
But then, clear as a clap, I am standing on stage
in my pedal pushers and my fake Izod shirt, and I hear
John Klug’s voice howl from the theater’s back row,
“I can’t means I won’t.” That is right before
he strides to the front of the stage, picks up the easel
and throws it into the empty audience,
where it lands in the training I attend thirty years later,
and I stare at it beside me, astonished he threw it,
but even more astonished at how simple it was,
the way he changed my life, how that afternoon
he guaranteed that every time I hear the phrase I can’t,
I see the chance to say instead, I can do it. I’ll try.