Creativity Is Within Us

"Believe in your heart that something wonderful is about to happen. Love your life. Believe in your own powers in your own potential and in your own goodness." These are not my words, but indeed powerful. Wake up every morning with the awe of just being alive. Live this day well. This is an excellent philosophy on life, not that I always adhere to everything I write. I will start right now to listen to myself and to respect, follow and be faithful to all the words I write about in these columns.

Dad loved life and he could have been the author of the above quotation I picked up on the Internet. He always thought today was great, tomorrow would be better and the next days (plural) would be exceptional. I as a kid often wondered why he had this philosophy because we did not have fancy things or objects; but even as a young person, I admired his thoughts on life and still do. He got such pleasure from really insignificant things that it was delightful.

If Mom made any dinner, he was so grateful for her work cooking it, he would say every night “Lea, this is delicious and extra tasty.” She was happy she pleased him and when she baked something every Friday, he would taste it and smack his lips in thinking it a gourmet item and believe me in those days, the word gourmet was not even known. She was an excellent cook and baker and even though money was so limited in the forties and fifties, she made delicious food for us.

The interesting thing was that he took such pleasure in eating it and sitting at the table with us all together each night. He would not start to take a bite unless we all were sitting there and eating together. We ate faster as kids will do, but we most of the time sat there as he who ate slower was still eating. As we got older, we did leave the table because we had lots of homework to do and in those days, everything was handwritten for our nightly home assignments. We did not own a typewriter and of course, there were no cellphones to converse with your friends or computers.

We were one of the fortunate ones who had a phone to ourselves because many of the neighbors had what were called party line phones. In order to save about two dollars a month, people had the party lines which meant your number was Madison 2345 J and your neighbor around the corner had the same number of Madison 2345K. This meant that when it rang once it was for you and if it rang twice it was for your neighbor. If you picked up the phone and it was for them, you heard the whole conversation of others.

We had that originally and when a neighbor told Dad that she heard my brother’s conversation with a girlfriend, Dad said no more and we indulged in getting our own single line for us where you did not share a line with others. We said thank you Dad for this wonderful thing as having no sharing with nosy strangers. Oh how rich we felt that day.

Simple things that anyone reading this from these now generations will think us silly when they see this phone episode of our lives was so important and fantastic to us. My friends thought we had won the lottery when they heard we had our own line as it was called then. Of course, there was no lottery then too.

If we had our own radio in our own bedroom, we thought us surely on the way to being rich. There was a huge cabinet, good wood with a radio in it and it sat in the living room where we gathered to LISTEN TO IT AS A FAMILY.

As we aged, we had our own small radio in our bedroom and we could listen to stories on there or to music by our self.

As I write all of this, I feel like I lived in the Middle Ages, way back when, in pre television days, in pre everything, everyone owned one auto and in pre cellphone or DVD days.

Let me tell you the truth, I knew others in the accelerated junior high I went to (this school for the smart teens from all over the city who were selected for their academics) to attend there and they were quite well to do, lots of them. They wore to school cashmere sweaters (no designer named clothing then) and Mouton Lamb coats on the weekend which was a bit much for a teen gal too.

However, that was OK because I had nice clothes, not of that expense, but stylish for the time and I looked fine. I did not envy their clothing because I felt ‘rich’ from the single phone line adventure and that was enough for then. I had books and records and a record player and good parents and a nice home and I was satisfied.

A young woman I know who is about fifty and she took up painting on canvas, flowers and houses and some small animals. I saw her paintings, they are good especially for someone just starting to create by painting with oil paints. When they were finished she framed them and hung them in her home and everyone was enthralled she had the talent. This was in her creative soul. Her name is Linda Burstyn.

I feel when I write Steven Behr of Washington State said to me about my writings "that's where you come in Elita with your writings, so continue to influence in a positive way and let's keep on dancing at our ages, and this is in our creative souls because you teach older ladies to dance and to love it"

I knew that someday, some wonderful things would happen to me when I got older and I truly believed in my own powers and in my own goodness as a person and things would be greater in my older life.

I was right, they all happened, first with an excellent job out in the business world where I earned a nice amount of a salary for a young person at that time and age and I was able to purchase anything I desired and I was able to pay for it with a check or cash, no charge accounts too prevalent then.

I was able to help my parents some in those days with buying them some things they would have not bought or spent money for and to send Mom to the beauty salon every week which made her so happy. Those charges were about five dollars which was a lot of money when you did not have it to spare and for her to have every other week a cleaning person to help with the house chores.

He was a man named Beryl, tall and strong and she had him every other Friday and his other Friday, he went to my brother’s mother-in-law. They shared him and Mom and the other woman were so delighted to have household assistance. He did all the hard cleaning and he could reach heights for dusting and washing things without a ladder because of his height. Mom was so delighted that I paid his money every other Friday of the huge sum of five dollars. I was so happy because it made the chores lighter for her and I could afford to give back some for all the love she and Dad gave to me.

So as the saying on the Internet said “in your heart believe that something wonderful is about to happen and love your life. Believe in your own powers and potential” because you are powerful in mind and thought.

When I worked, the boss told my husband after I was married and I had left the position and we met him at a social gathering and computers had just come into the glory of home and business. He said “Elita had the mind of a computer, long before they were invented.”

So if that was true, it was because I knew in my heart way back when I was a kid, that something splendid was about to happen some day and I knew I had the power to make it become a reality.

Always believe in yourself and your powers and potential, even if you are a senior now and realize that every day is a gift. Remember too at any given moment, you have the ability to say this is not how the story is going to end. Say to yourself, this is how it will begin.