Chicken Soup for the Soul 20th Anniversary Edition (37 page)

Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.

~Henry Ford

Be patient and tough; someday this pain will be useful to you.

~Ovid

W
hen you make an observation, you have an obligation.
This is the piece of poetry that I try to live by. It’s the mantra that led me through rural Pennsylvania to conduct a creative writing workshop in prison — the pen.

As I pulled up to the jail — a colorless lump of concrete strangled with jagged concertina wire — rain fell, flickering like old film. I remembered how my life had been transformed by a single blank page. Remembered how I showed up to Crefeld, an alternative school in Philadelphia, as a troubled teen who’d been expelled from everywhere else. Remembered how Stacey, the English teacher, placed a blank sheet of paper down in front of me and told me, simply, “Write.”

“Write what?” I asked her.

Stacey’s response — “anything you want” — changed my life.

I stared at the blank page, an ocean of white glowing with possibility. Its blankness begged me to tell a story — dared me to share my own.

But I couldn’t. I froze, terrified and uncomfortable. There were things I wanted to say, but my pen was stuck, my words trapped like water under an ice block. The distance between my mind and the page felt like it could’ve been measured in light-years.

“It’s like there’s a wall,” I said.

“Every wall is a door,” Stacey replied. “You don’t need to be great to get started, but you need to get started to be great.” Stacey transformed her observation of me into an obligation to me.

Finally I gripped the pen. My hand shook and trembled like it was freezing. Then it hit me: a silence louder than all the music I’d ever heard. I took a breath, then exhaled — deep, like I just rose from under water.

I stared so deep into the page that I saw myself. Then I felt something I’d never felt before: purpose. I realized that I am the blank page, that we are all blank pages.

Because the blank page was the starter pistol that triggered my purpose, helping to take me from a juvenile delinquent to an award-winning writer, filmmaker, and professor, it was my hope to share the power and possibility of creative writing with the prisoners. I remembered the words of my mentor, Maya Angelou: “When you get, give. When you learn, teach.”

Inside I huddled with an intense group of inmates, all young men, all bent on not being broken. After the workshop, I was taken to visit the cellblock where they spent the bulk of their days and nights. On my way out, I noticed that Jordan, a participant in the workshop who was suffering from writer’s block, had the only cell whose bed did not have a mattress.

“No mattress?” I asked, puzzled.

“I have one, but I don’t sleep on it,” he told me. “What do you sleep on?” I pried.

“The hard floor, the steel frame, anywhere but not on this,” he asserted as he hunched beneath the bunk and flashed a flimsy mattress. “See,” he started, as he reburied the cot, “I can’t sleep on that. It’s too comfortable and I don’t trust comfort in a place like this.”

For Jordan, certain comforts numbed him to the raspy reality of where he really was. He used his discomfort to remind him of where he was and where he wanted to go. I remembered my initial discomfort with the blank page, my writer’s block, and thought about where I am now. Then I thought about Jordan’s struggles, both on the page and off, and how through discomfort, tremendous growth is possible.

When you make an observation, you have an obligation.

Before I left, I handed Jordan a blank page.

~MK Asante

Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.

~Seneca

W
e who lived in the concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: The last of his freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

~Viktor E. Frankl

Man’s Search for Meaning

To change one’s life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.

~William James

Consider this:

• After Fred Astaire’s first screen test, the memo from the testing director of MGM, dated 1933, said, “Can’t act! Slightly bald! Can dance a little!” Astaire kept that memo over the fireplace in his Beverly Hills home.
  
• An expert said of Vince Lombardi: “He possesses minimal football knowledge. Lacks motivation.”
  
• Socrates was called, “An immoral corrupter of youth.”
  
• When Peter J. Daniel was in the fourth grade, his teacher, Miss Phillips, constantly said, “Peter J. Daniel, you’re no good, you’re a bad apple and you’re never going to amount to anything.” Peter was virtually illiterate until he was 26. A friend stayed up with him all night and read him a copy of
  Think and Grow Rich.
  Now he owns the street corners he used to fight on and just published his latest book:
  Miss Phillips, You Were Wrong!
  
• Louisa May Alcott, the author of
  Little Women,
  was encouraged to find work as a servant or seamstress by her family.
  
• Beethoven handled the violin awkwardly and preferred playing his own compositions instead of improving his technique. His teacher called him hopeless as a composer.
  
• The parents of the famous opera singer Enrico Caruso wanted him to be an engineer. His teacher said he had no voice at all and could not sing.
  
• Charles Darwin, father of the theory of evolution, gave up a medical career and was told by his father, “You care for nothing but shooting, dogs and rat catching.” In his autobiography, Darwin wrote, “I was considered by all my masters and by my father, a very ordinary boy, rather below the common standard in intellect.”
  
• Walt Disney was fired by a newspaper editor for lack of ideas. Walt Disney also went bankrupt before he built Disneyland.
  
• Thomas Edison’s teachers said he was too stupid to learn anything.
  
• Albert Einstein did not speak until he was four years old and didn’t read until he was seven. His teacher described him as “mentally slow, unsociable and adrift forever in his foolish dreams.” He was expelled and was refused admittance to the Zurich Polytechnic School.
  
• Louis Pasteur was only a mediocre pupil in undergraduate studies and ranked 15th out of 22 in chemistry.
  
• Isaac Newton did very poorly in grade school.
  
• The sculptor Rodin’s father said, “I have an idiot for a son.” Described as the worst pupil in the school, Rodin failed three times to secure admittance to the school of art. His uncle called him uneducable.
  
• Leo Tolstoy, author of
  War and Peace,
  flunked out of college. He was described as “both unable and unwilling to learn.”
  
• Playwright Tennessee Williams was enraged when his play
  Me, Vasha
  was not chosen in a class competition at Washington University where he was enrolled in English XVI. The teacher recalled that Williams denounced the judges’ choices and their intelligence.
  
• F. W. Woolworth’s employers at the dry goods store said he had not enough sense to wait upon customers.
  
• Henry Ford failed and went broke five times before he finally succeeded.
  
• Babe Ruth, considered by sports historians to be the greatest athlete of all time and famous for setting the home run record, also holds the record for strikeouts.
  
• Winston Churchill failed sixth grade. He did not become Prime Minister of England until he was 66, and then only after a lifetime of defeats and setbacks. His greatest contributions came when he was a “senior citizen.”
  
• Eighteen publishers turned down Richard Bach’s 10,000-word story about a “soaring” seagull,
  Jonathan Livingston Seagull,
  before Macmillan finally published it in 1970. By 1975 it had sold more than 7 million copies in the U.S. alone.
  
• Richard Hooker worked for seven years on his humorous war novel,
  M*A*S*H,
  only to have it rejected by more than a dozen publishers before Morrow decided to publish it. It became a runaway bestseller, spawning a blockbuster movie and a highly successful television series.
  

~Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen