by Jonathan Odell

In life, you can either live out of your imagination,

or you can live out of your history. ~Stephen Covey

That’s what we adults do with much of our lives. We live out of our history, doing the things that have worked once upon a time. We obey the rules. We avoid the things that didn’t work while stubbornly refusing to imagine a new story for ourselves.

One of my favorite quotes about childhood is from Graham Greene: “There is always one moment in a child’s life when the door opens and lets the future in.”

I remember plainly that happening to me when I was four. My father and I are out driving. As always, when he approaches the railroad tracks near our home, he comes to a complete stop, even though no train is in sight.

This time I ask him, “Daddy, why do you stop?”

He nods up at a big white sign with black writing. “ ’Cause it tells you to.”

I didn’t hear anybody tell my daddy to do anything. “Who told you? What’d he say?”

He points. “See, it says, ‘Mississippi Law Stop.’ ”

Those were the first three words I learned to read. And they held magic. Not because they told my father what to do. But because he did it! Nobody ever told my father what to do.

I mean nobody.

Yet these strange markings held a power over my father. I was impressed. It had to be God speaking through things called words.

That’s when I illogically, insanely, and unscientifically fell in love with language.

From then on, when we approached a stop sign or yield sign or a dead end, I begged to get out of the car and for Daddy to hold me up to touch the sign, to let me run my fingers over the raised lettering. In that moment, the door opened and let the future in.

Soon I would forget.

The door didn’t shut all at once. It began in the first grade. Education was about being taught to see things like others have seen them for generations before. About learning the cold, dead facts of the world. Competence, proficiency, and performance. Meeting others’ expectations.

Imagination and creativity were not appreciated.

I hung on a few years trying to live out of my imagination, trying to believe in magic. But day by day, the world became less enchanted. Music was no longer something you spontaneously sang when you were happy. It became a dead animal that could be dissected into bars and notes and key signatures.

A flower could be analyzed by its component parts—petal, stamen, pistil, sepal—without once taking into account its beauty, its fragrance, the way it made you feel loved by God. Everything could be pulled apart, sorted and compartmentalized, pinned down like butterflies poised, midflight, in a glass display case.

I was in the fifth grade when a critical break with my imagined life occurred. My teacher was Mrs. Ainsworth. Her motto was, “A child’s learning will never interfere with my lesson plan.”

I remember Easter was approaching and Mrs. Ainsworth told us we were going to have an art contest. I was excited. I loved to draw. To a kid, a blank page, like the future, is an invitation to create something totally your own.

I remember exactly what I drew. I put three crosses on a purple hill. Purple was a sad color and I knew God was sad watching his only boy die. So of course the ground had to be purple.

Mrs. Ainsworth chose my picture to use as a bad example of art. She said she had never seen purple grass. She told us real art, art that counted, was about color schemes, geometric shapes, and proportion.

I learned once and for all that enthusiasm, originality, and joy did not count for much in life. Keeping your head down and following the rules did.

Your masters didn’t care what you loved, only how well you mimicked their thinking.

A door shut. It took another 40 years to pry that door open again, reclaim the magic, and become a writer.

It’s taken a lot of work, spiritual and emotional, to recover what little bit of boldness I now possess to imagine a new future—to transcend my history and see new options.

One way I’ve done it is to give myself “do-overs.” Kids get to do do-overs all the time, when they shout, “That doesn’t count! Let me do it again!”

Last September I had a chance for a do-over I hadn’t planned. I got a call from a one-of-a-kind schoolteacher. He knew about the work I was doing with story and wondered if there was anything that could apply to kids.

His students were at an age when they were learning competencies like reading and writing, but he wanted to make sure they didn’t lose their internal voices—their creativity and imagination.

I could almost hear their doors creaking shut. “What grades are we talking about?” I asked.

Of course I knew what he was going to say. “Fifth grade.”

Talk about returning to the scene of the crime! I was going to get to do the fifth grade over, without Mrs. Ainsworth.

When I showed up I had 54 children looking up at me. I could see in their eyes that the magic was still there, their willingness to believe the unbelievable. I asked myself, if I were one of them, what would I have loved Mrs. Ainsworth to tell me in the fifth grade? I had the overwhelming urge to shout, “Run for your lives! Don’t believe what grown-ups tell you! The magic is REAL! If you lose it, you’ll never get it back.”

Instead I slowly looked around the room, taking in the attentive, respectful group dressed in their Catholic school uniforms. Blue slacks and jumpers, white shirts.

I asked, “How many of you played dress-up when you were a kid?” This quiet, well-behaved group of kids, who were trained to raise their hands to speak, spontaneously erupted in laughter and animated chatter. They were all telling their stories at once.

When I was able to get their attention, I asked, “Now, how many of you had fun getting dressed this morning?”

The energy died. No one moved. The question had returned them to the world of competence, of right and wrong, of denying your uniqueness so you don’t stand out. A world in which imagination only gets you in trouble.

I told them that this was like writing. Writing has a lot of rules you have to master or you won’t get very far. Punctuation, spelling, neatness, grammar. I told them it was like wearing a uniform to school. Sometimes you had to do it.

But I told them our story writing was going to be different. “When you write your stories, I want it to feel like playing dress-up.

“There are no rules. Spelling doesn’t count. Neither does grammar or neatness. You can write at your desk, on the floor, or standing on your head. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. You get to try things on and decide if they fit you or not. Just listen to what makes your heart jump. That is your own personal voice trying to speak. Write that. That’s what the best writers do.”

One of the kids is known by his teachers as shy, not good at sports, a boy who always sits in the back of the room. Dale is a loner. His teachers worry about him socially as well as academically. They can’t get to him. They are afraid they are going to lose him.

After I had met with the class over a couple of months, Dale gathered the courage to slip me a two-page story when nobody was looking. When I read his work that evening, I was dumbfounded. It was brilliant. It hummed with life and energy and spontaneity and imagination. I couldn’t believe this work came from the same boy. He told a better story than most of the adults I teach.

I wanted Dale to read his story to the class. The teachers were afraid he would choke. Or that the other kids wouldn’t respond favorably and he would end up even more isolated. But we thought it worth the gamble. There was something about this boy. In my heart, I knew what this boy was up to. He was making his move. He was close to being overwhelmed by his history. The door to an imagined future was closing. In the only way he could, he was telling me, “My time has come.”

The day arrived when Dale, this shy wallflower of a boy, stood alone before his classmates. The notebook pages shook in his hand. For a moment, Dale stopped breathing. Then he began to mumble his story.

I panicked. The teachers’ fears were going to be realized. I went up to Dale and whispered into his ear, “Dale, this is a wonderful story. And you know what? It’s yours and nobody else’s. I want you to read it like you love it.”

He looked down at his story, as if recognizing it for the first time. He smiled and began again. When he spoke, it was with authority. I was transfixed. This boy was speaking his words, telling his story, and he was, in that moment, living a life that was uniquely his, one that no one had lived before. Dale was imagining a future better than anyone had predicted for him. And he was doing it right before our eyes.

We all sat mesmerized.

As he stood there reading, I’m sure everyone was thinking the same thing I was: “Oh, this is who Dale is. I never knew.”

In that moment he was larger than all the labels the world had put on him. He was bigger than the reasonable conclusions of all the experts. Dale was throwing off his history. And the future was saying “yes” to the man he was becoming.

When Dale was finished, the kids gave him a wild round of applause and flocked around him like he was a football hero, congratulating him, patting him on the back, peppering him with questions about the man-eating dinosaur he had created and about the two boy hunters who went tracking it. They wanted to know more about this new person who had magically appeared in their midst. And Dale had found an abundant supply of himself to give.

I looked over at the teacher who was so worried about Dale. She had tears in her eyes.

Dale and the other 53 kids had become our teachers. They taught us that the urge to tell a story is innate, fragile, unique, and must be honored, unconditionally affirmed, and protected from the critics and naysayers, the soul killers of the world.

They taught us that story is a communal experience. We need each other to tell our story. No one, the listener or the teller, is ever the same after a story has been told and witnessed.

I’ve decided Graham Greene was wrong. The opportunity doesn’t come around just once. It’s there every day of the year. I think the universe is always opening the door and showing us a new life never before imagined, whispering to us, “Stay alive until the very end!” Yet in a world of deafened ears, children are usually the only ones who hear it.

And if they are very lucky, at least one of the coauthors of their stories, a teacher, a mother, a father, someone they look up to, will tell them in a thousand different ways, “Honor your story, kid. Hang on to your voice. It’s the only thing that’s going to get you through this world alive.”

Jonathan Odell is the author of the The View from Delphi (Macadam/Cage 2004), which deals with the struggle for equality in pre-civil rights Mississippi, his home state. His novel, The Healing, has just been acquired by Nan A.Talese/Doubleday and will be released early 2012. Website: jon-odell.com

His short stories and essays have appeared in Stories from the Blue Moon Café (Macadam/Cage 2004), Men Like That (University of Chicago Press, 2001), Letters of the Twentieth Century (Dial Press, 1999), Breaking Silence (Xanthus Press, 1996), Speakeasy Literary Magazine, Gertrude Journal, and the Savannah Literary Journal. He has also written for Commonweal Magazine and has had his work featured in the Utne Reader.

Jonathan recently designed and implemented a groundbreaking literary intervention for elementary and middle school children that uses story creation as a way to increase a child’s love for reading and writing, self-esteem and classroom safety. A regular instructor as the Loft, Jonathan will be teaching a one day class April 2nd, entitled “Beginning in the Middle: Writing at Midlife”

A version of this essay appeared first on Jonathan’s website, www.jon-odell.com.