My wife and I are reading Peggy Noonan’s “When Character Was King”, for the second time. It’s as cozy as hot chocolate in a thunderstorm. The world literally washes away when we open it up at night. On page 246 this excerpt of Ronald Reagan on creativity is certainly worth sharing:

Reagan thought people were smart. He thought they were creative. He thought this in part because in Hollywood he had seen the greatest creativity everyday, and not only from actors and directors but from cinematographers, editors, stuntmen, writers and the producers who made artistic advances possible.

Reagan thought the genius of America was that it was the place where genius was allowed. You could be your weirdly uniquely creative self and be celebrated for it and make a lot of money at it and go on to do creative things with your money or responsible things or silly things, waste it at the track, it’s up to you, that’s what freedom is in part, the freedom to be silly and irresponsible.

And to be creative.
And to imagine.

And so he never saw history as static, as sitting there like a dry and dusty plain. He saw it as something you could change.

Did you hear the thunder crack?