Creativity: Alphabet Soup

I was watching a clip on TV recently about an ultra chic, ultra expensive four story penthouse apartment in NYC with a round, metal slide inside that looked a little like the inside out intestines of some giant animal or the frame of the Georges Pompidou Museum in Paris.

What intrigued me the most was how much fun it would be to slide down, although I was a teeny bit uncomfortable imagining the closed in feeling I might get being inside a tube, even if it was a bright shiny silver and it was my slide.  But it still looked like a lot of fun.  Maybe the most fun part of the whole place.

And then I remembered something.  When I was a little girl in preschool and kindergarten, there were three or four of us who used to "hang" together ( of course we didn't call it that then).  One of us lived with her parents in a brownstone between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive.  They rented out the basement and lived on the top two or three floors. 

 One of my favorite things from going to her house was eating the Campbell's alphabet soup.  Or should I  say reading the letters (well some of them anyway)and then eating it.We didn't eat Campbell's alphabet soup at my house so this was really cool and exotic to me.  But my other favorite thing at her house was the banisters.  They were a warm dark wood and went all the way up (or all the way down depending on your perspective) and they were curved and burnished and all that good stuff.  And most of all they were perfect for sliding down.  And so we did - with great delight.  And all the more so since we'd discovered how to do it all by ourselves and this was not what they were originally made for. 

 And remembering our delight made me think some more.  Maybe part of finding joy in something is discovering it for yourself and turning it to your own uses, diverting it from its more usual, mundane purposes and re-visioning it it for  a new purpose. And isn't that what creativity and discovery are all about?

 Wouldn't it be better in even the most, chic,modern and well-appointed house to leave something that could be discovered and transformed instead of providing everything anyone could want.

And perhaps that approach could be beneficial in other areas of life as well.