Life Inside The Margins
As a child, I struck an unusual balance between grasping a lot of concepts for my age and completely overlooking the obvious.
When we started using ruled, three-hole-punched sheets of paper, I would turn in work that would get high marks — along with comments that I needed to stay within the margins. I had no idea what the teachers were talking about. How I made it that far without understanding the role of those vertical lines down each side of the page, I’ll never know.
It actually took several such notes from teachers before I understood. Too reserved to ask, I just kept writing and turning in pages with text from edge to edge. When a teacher finally showed me personally what I was doing wrong, I felt the liberty that only proper guidelines can bring.
For the past 27 years, as I’ve written for newspapers, magazines and our clients, I’ve grown to appreciate those margins more and more. Staying within the margins as I take notes gives me more space on the sides to fill up with more notes and thoughts and follow up questions and drawings and…
And that’s the pattern of my life.
Space is there for me to fill it up. Now that’s a great way to live, until, of course, life hands you something too large to fit in the margins. When you’ve filled up the page and have notes and drawings all up and down the sides, top and bottom, what do you do when, for instance, you are diagnosed with a rare and incurable disease? That’s a question I could not find a satisfactory answer to when it came my way.
In fact, the only answer was to grab a clean sheet of paper and start over.
I pushed the old sheet to the side and, with the new sheet in front of me, began to transcribe what life would look like moving forward. My first inclination was “everything. I can just write smaller and move over everything.” When my condition grew worse and the complications became more complicated, I had to face the reality that such an approach would simply not work.
I’m far from finished with the task of moving things over, but the first thing I had to do was learn a new respect for those margins. If you fill them up right off the bat, there’s no space for surprises.
And surprises will come.
So for me, I’ve started by moving those margins further in, creating more space around the edges.
Today, I understand even better the reality of my neurologist’s words that “with myasthenia gravis, the first three years are the most difficult.” It will demand more of me at times, and I will adjust or pay the price. Those are difficult words for me to write. I want to walk to the edge and have a look for myself. I want to take opportunities to learn more, grow more, do more, see more, be more. I want to see how many plates I can keep spinning while I go find sticks to add more.
But that is no longer a reasonable plan for my life. If I fill it up, margins and all, I’ll end up missing out later on. I must learn to sacrifice the good in order to experience the great. (Read John 15:1–2)
Life can be rich without being stuffed. I’m learning how to pull my margins back.
How about you? Have you ever found yourself at capacity with nowhere else to write? What did you do?
