Our lives are made of our deeply held feelings about what we can or can’t do. Let’s riff on it.

“I can’t perform brain surgery. I mean, really!” I can’t either. The list of things we literally can’t do is extremely long. And that’s okay! The brain surgeon can’t whistle, but we can!
“I can’t fly a plane, of course. I’ve had no training whatsoever.” Sure. But from time to time we read in the news that a passenger with no training was able to land a plane safely, with help from the control tower, after the pilot passed out. Some things we really totally can’t do; others we might become able to do in special circumstances. We don’t know the true limits of our talents and capabilities.
“I can’t draw, never could. Never, never, never.” You might feel certain of that, until the day you actually hold a pencil in your tender fingers and use it to caress a sheet of paper with. “Whaaaat? I can draw?” Some of our certainties are lies that we tell ourselves, and the lies are often supported by an elaborate intellectual and emotional scaffolding. Demolish the scaffolding, dissolve the lie, deny the I can’t!
“I can’t speak, I have no voice.” But I just heard you say, out loud, “I can’t speak, I have no voice!” I think what you mean is, “I’m uncomfortable speaking in public and I don’t enjoy the sensations of my own breath and my own vocal cords.” The subconscious listens to what you say, and takes your statements as commands. If you say “I can’t speak,” the subconscious will obey your command and prevent you from speaking. Instead, say “I want to be more comfortable. Where do I start?” You’ll receive a sign, most likely!
“I can’t wear that shirt.” What will happen, exactly, if you put the shirt on and get out of the house? Will you cause a car crash? Will lightening strike you? Likes and dislikes evolve toward can’s and can’t’s, to coin an expression. I too dislike many types of clothing. And I wouldn’t want to cause a car crash. Recently I’ve started wearing patterned shirts, after many years of wearing nothing but solids. Clothing is part of our identity. I’m glad I’m opening up.
“I can’t resign from my horrible job, where a monstrous boss and a gang of toxic co-workers make my life miserable.” Jobs are important. Or, to put it more broadly, having or earning enough money to survive is important. But suppose you quit the job and sell the house and move to a small rental studio on the edge of downtown, and you get enough money from the house sale to not worry about rent for three years. Then you get a part-time job at a bakery within walking distance of your rental studio and, hey, I’m poor and I’m absolutely ecstatic! It’s not easy to undergo revolutionary change. A monkish lifestyle isn’t for everyone. Strangely, living without strife isn’t for everyone either.
“I can’t be happy. My mother would be terribly hurt if I was happier than her, more dynamic, more fulfilled.” Ah, revolutionary change again! It takes a lot of inner work to get to the point where your wellbeing is the most important thing in your life, the thing that you nourish constantly, THE thing. Parental, familiar, and societal expectations are a big source of I can’t. The passage from I can’t to I can is, symbolically, a departure from the family and the society that impose its restrictions on you. Separation anxiety is guaranteed.

We are all in the grip of I can’t, in some way or another, or in many ways. I’m no exception. My anecdotes don’t mean that I go about my day singing “I can, I can, I can!” I’m just acknowledging a big phenomenon (which affects every human being without exception), systematizing it to some degree, and telling some jokes to see if you and I manage to defeat some of these handicapping I can’t’s.

“Believe you can and you're halfway there.” — Theodore Roosevelt

Lao Tzu was sitting on the trusty squeaky rocker in his porch when Confucius happened to come by. “Thou frowneth,” Confucius said. “What ails thee, dear Shih Tzu?”

Lao had heard the joke before, but he had Tao-ed himself into not minding it too much. “I’m going on a thousand-mile journey, Confusion.”

Confucius had heard the joke before, and he really hated it. But he kept it all bottled up. “A thousand-mile journey,” he chuckled. “And this concerns me how, Shih Shih?”

Tzu didn’t mind one Shih, but two? He kept it all bottled up. “I don’t know how to start.”

Confucius took a breath in through his left nostril, and let it out through the right. It was a cold day, and you could see the puffy puffs from his breathing. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step,” he said with a slight bow and two puffy puffs.

Hearing this bit of commonplace so-called wisdom, Shih Shih—I mean, Lao—couldn’t take it any longer. He sprang into action, unsheathed his invisible sword, and cut Confusion—sorry, I mean Kung Fucious—into 7456 paper butterflies. Confucius vanished, just like in a movie directed by Ang Lee. And Lao Tzu took the first, single step on his thousand-mile journey. Truth be told, he was happy that his old, old, old friend had helped him get off his rocker.

In 1969 I was eleven years old, and I attended middle school in São Paulo, Brazil. The building still stands, although the actual school is no more.

One day I’ll tell you about the joys and horrors of middle school—no, never! I’ll never go back to middle school, never, ever, forever and whatever! But the thing is, we had English class twice a week (with a teacher who may or may not have been named Mildred or Meredith). And our textbook was titled First Things First. It was a beautiful little object, nicely designed with not too much text and some groovy drawings. It made us feel super-sophisticated: learning a foreign language, learning to speak differently, learning to think differently, learning to be someone else. Yay! In only eight years I’d leave Brazil for good and start roaming the world, but I didn’t know that yet.

First Things First, the book and its title, the thoughts and emotions that the book triggered, the dreams and aspirations of the eleven-year-old, they have all stayed with me. If Marcel Proust had Internet, I bet he too would Google a ton of stuff from his childhood. This is a very “English” English textbook: the first page of the first lesson is all about manners, excuse me, pardon, thank you.

There’s a famous apocryphal saying variously attributed to Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or Genghis Khan: “If I have six hours to chop down a tree, I’ll spend the first four hours sharpening my ax.” Actually, Genghis is suspected of having stolen George’s ax, but it doesn’t change the gist of it: sharpen first, chop down second. First things first!

When you have a big mess somewhere—the dining room after a party, for instance—you’ll make a first decision: to open the windows and air the room; to collect all the glasses before collecting any plates; or to throw away that chunk of stinky cheese before doing anything else, by Jove! A smart first decision improves working conditions, saves time and effort, and produces much better results.

Your “first reaction” to any one stimulus is supremely important: love or fear, relaxation or contraction, feel good or feel bad. The reaction is embodied. Head, neck, and back; jaw, tongue, and throat; shoulders and arms, pelvis and legs. Toes. And every vein and cartilage, also the hairs on the back of your neck and the goose pimples (which we Brazilians call the goose pimps). The embodiment happens in two ways: gradually and suddenly, both at the same time. Warning: on this paragraph, one or more statements may be jokes. Re-read, please.

Despite being as opposite as Heaven and Earth, Lao Tzu and Confucius do agree on the most important of principles:

Feeling good feels good, and feeling bad feels bad.

Feeling bad scrunches your neck and thickens your blood and lowers your intelligence. Feeling good elevates your soul and warms your heart and zips up your pants. The “zero decision,” before the first decision, is to feel good. Because you really don’t want to sharpen that ax or to chop down that tree when your intelligence is low and your fly is undone.

Feel good first, then sharpen the ax and chop the tree. Feel good first, then throw away the stinky cheese and move house. Feel good first, then take the first step on the thousand-mile journey.