A Quote by Jan Brett
My parents would tell us to go outside and play or to do creative stuff, but television was very limited. So we used our own creativity to entertain ourselves. We were out in the woods a lot making huts and playing horses.
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Building and tinkering were such a huge part of our childhood, whether we were trying to entertain ourselves as kids, helping our parents out on the ranch, or getting creative with school projects.
We weren't playing much Dungeons and Dragons, we were mostly playing Magic the Gathering, but very similar. And we would go out in the woods and you felt like you were on these adventures.
I realized horses have personality when I bought one and I had one, who's now out to pasture, a horse named Drifter. Before that, I was a city boy. Horses, I used to go out to the LaBagh Woods and ride at a stable once every two years or something; no idea about horses. Dogs, I knew, had personalities, but not horses.
When I was growing up, kids would go outside and play all day and invent things. And my brothers and I pretended our picnic table was a ship one summer. Our bikes were horses, and our trees were forts. We turned everything in the world into make-believe.
We are ourselves creations. We are meant to continue creativity by being creative ourselves. This is the God-force extending itself through us. Creativity is God's gift to us. Using creativity is our gift back to God.
An amazing piece of advice for a lot of kids, 50-year-olds, whoever is listening right now: Saving money is a good strategy. I didn't have stuff, but it was because my parents were saving. They were saving. We didn't get toys. They told us to go outside and paint a rock. It was very, very smart because after seven or eight years, he was able to buy a liquor store of his own in Springfield, New Jersey - Shoppers Discount Liquors. He built up a great business.
I'm used to riding horses. My father used to breed horses when I was a child. I grew up in Tipperary, in the country, and lots of people have horses there. If my parents hadn't been in the business, we would have them anyway, as pets. And my cousin Richard is a jockey.
While all the other kids were out playing ball and stuff, I used to stay in my room and imagine that there was a camera in the wall. And I used to really believe that I was putting on a television show and that it was going out to somewhere in the world.
Somehow people have been sold on the idea that only professionals can entertain them, that only professionals can sing or tell jokes. And people are cut out of this creativity loop, and creativity is being limited to these large, centralized voices.
When I was a kid, being outside was the norm. Rain or shine, our parents would tell us to get out of the house.
When I started out, I tried out all my stuff on national television. There were no comedy clubs, but even if there were, I don't think I would have gone to them. I used to do stuff in the bathroom, and then I'd drive down to NBC and do it on 'The Golddiggers' with Dean Martin.
Go back to the very beginning, when we first started playing in local pubs. We used to play Chuck Berry covers. Every now and then, we'd slip in one of our own songs, and we found that we were getting away with it - nobody seemed to know these were original tracks.
I've come to realize that making it your life's work to be different than your parents is not only hard to do, it's a dumb idea. Not everything we found fault with was necessarily wrong; we were right, for example, to resent, as kids, being told when to go to bed. We'd be equally wrong, as parents, to let our kids stay up all night. To throw out all the tools of parenting just because our parents used them would be like making yourself speak English without using ten letters of the alphabet; it's hard to do.
I'm a very creative person in general. I like to create stuff in my downtime off the court. If I were to tell you everything I do, you would be like, "Do you really play tennis?"
Think about reading: Today, parents would love it if their kids read books more because the parents understand the books. Just over 100 years ago, parents were upset because their kids were reading dime-store novels. Parents would say, "I don't want you inside reading anymore. Get outside and play." I guarantee you, in 50 years or so, parents are going to say, "You're not going outside to play until you finish that video game."
When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. They planted groves and walks of Plantanes, where they took subdiales ambulationes in porticos open to the air. Of course, it is of no use to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither.
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