text: Years ago, when I started looking for my first job, wise advisers advised, "Barbara, be enthusiastic ! Enthusiasm will take you further than any amount of experience." How right they were! 
  
  "Nothing great was ever done without enthusiasm," wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is the paste that helps you hang in there when the things get tough. It is the inner voice that tells you, "I can do it!" when others shout, "No, you can't!" It took years and years for the early work of Barbara McClintock, a geneticist who won the 1983 Nobel Prize in medicine, to be generally accepted. Yet she didn't stop working on her experiments. 
  
  We are all born with wide-eyed, enthusiastic wonder and it is the childlike wonder that gives enthusiastic people such youthful air, whatever their age. At 90, cellist Pablo Casals would start his day by playing the cello . As the music flowed through his fingers, his shoulders would straighten and joy would reappear in his eyes. As writer and poet Samuel Ullman once worte, "Years wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul." 
  
  Enthusiastic people also love what they do, not considering money or title or power. Patricia Mellratl, a retired director of the Missouri Rpertory Theater in Kansas City, was once asked where she got her enthusiasm. She replied, "My father, long ago, told me, 'I never made any money until I stopped working for it.'" 
  
  We can't afford to waste tears on "might-have-been". We need to turn the tears into sweat as we go after "what-can-be". We need to live each moment whole-heartedly, with all our senses finding pleasure in the sweet of a backyard garden, the simple picture of a six-year-old, and the beauty of a rainbow.