My storytelling father always seemed to be able to hold our collective breaths with his tales of ghosts and the undead. You knew how effective his scary stories were by the number of under the bed inspections that were held in our house. I’m sure my mother appreciated it since my father worked at nights at the New York Times. My father’s imagination was legend and so were our nightmares. Just don’t ask me to go down to your basement.

My father’s ghostly tales took on the tragic demise of the Easter Bunny (car accident) or Santa Claus (burnt alive) and I remember us sitting there laughing and then wondering what did he have in store for all of us. Beheadings,  being skinned alive or bored to death.  Once the Tooth Fairy was put through a shredder, the thing that went bump in the night was just my heart pounding out of my chest.  I didn’t dare let him know that it scared the living crap out of me. He would have felt guilty, but then he would have gone on about how the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow was misunderstood.

I suspect my father courted Frankenstein’s author, Mary Shelley, before he met my mother.

I was listening to “The Second Half of Life” in my car last week. The author, Angeles Arrien PH.D, talked about how storytelling can trigger memories, associations and one’s imagination.

Really? She never got the chance to listen to John Francis Cassidy weave a tale of dread because she would have included blood-curdling screams that pierced the moonless night.

Dr. Arrien touched on a true story by Dr. Charles Garfield who has written about high performance people. Like my father.

It unfolded something like this:

In 1984, Dr. Garfield encountered a toll booth employee on the Oakland/San Francisco Bridge who was dancing to loud music that was blasting from his toll booth. The doctor asked what was going on. The dancing man in the booth said that he was having a party. What about the other people working in the other booths? Oh, they were not invited to his party.  Loud horns blasted from impatient drivers (don’t you just love them) and that ended the conversation but the doctor made a mental note to find the dancing man again.

And he did.

The dance party was still going on. The Dancing Man remembered the doctor and he asked the good doctor what the other 16 toll booths looked like to him.  The doctor had no clue. “No imagination, no imagination,” was the reply that came from the toll booth.  “Look again, look again.”

The doctor gave up and pleaded for an answer from the Dancing Man.

“Vertical Coffins.  These 16 people come to work everyday at 8:30 and die in their booths and then at 4:30 they come back to life just in time to go home. They look like Vertical Coffins.”

“What makes it different for you?” The doctor needed to know why this one man was so happy.

“I have a corner office with glass on all sides. I can see the Golden Gate Bridge, Berkley Heights, and San Francisco and while thousands of people travel everyday to visit, I get to live it. I get to dance. I get to do what I love.”

So many of us don’t get to live the lives we are entitled to. We go by someone else’s rules and expectations and we forget that we even had dreams that were so full of hope and adventure. We find ourselves getting by on, “no imagination, no imagination” and we struggle in our own vertical coffins.

How would it feel to dismantle one or two of those vertical coffins that keep you from what you really want to do? It could be as simple as saying “No” to some of the requests/demands that are shoved on you and not feeling guilty about it. It can be as grand as reexamining where your lives are going: does the job do it for me, would going back to school open me up again or would Jimmy Choo’s shoes really make me feel better?  The latter was what Gwyneth Paltrow asked me one day while I was mixing my medications (Charlie Sheen can do it, why can’t I?).  I assured her that they would.

Trick or treat.

© 2010, Coach on the Edge ™

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