Do you see the margin on this page. That isn’t space wasted, that is space in reserve for words that have yet to be written, words that have not even been thought. Margins can come in very handy.
Our lives benefit from the same principle. The “reserve” in our lives, whether it be time, or emotion, or energy or money is margin that can be utilized for important or urgent things that have yet presented themselves.
Many of us live our lives to the edges. We don’t have any margins. By the day’s end our time, our patience, our strength and our dollars have all been spent. I see this in my own life far too often. And when something “extra” does come along, stress is the feeling I experience as I try to squeeze yet one more thing into a life that has been written to the edges.
One thing that has become clear to me in my battle with a margin-less life is that only doing “good” things doesn’t work. There are too many good things for me and for my family. I need to start asking a different question. More like, “Is this a right thing for me to do now?”
How do you see it? Do you have margins? How do you keep them?
I probably shouldn’t say it, but I laughed like a hyena on a banned substance when I read the title of this post. So I had to read it. I think you make a good point.
With the help of coffee (or, under the lash of coffee, depending on your point of view), I’m all about scribbling into the margins of my philosophical sheet of paper. In fact, in pre-email days, that was a feature of most of my letters.
I don’t think it’s what you’re driving at, but I think the number one way to reduce stress, and have the energy to more than mutter incoherently at your spouse at the end of the day is to cut back on the joe.
Cutting back in general is probably a good thing health-wise, but then, you always kind of wonder what you’re missing out on.