Margins

When I was in junior school … like three thousand years ago … things were different. We wore our own clothes, ‘break time’ was called ‘play time’, and we actually did play games together that did not need batteries or grown ups!! Inside we sat at desks, where we stashed sneaky sweets, teachers wrote on a board that was black, with chalk that got everywhere. Some of those things were good, some not so.

I especially remember that we were taught a certain pre digital, pre typewriter skill: drawing margins. You were given a page full of drawings equidistant horizontal lines to write on, but, heaven forbid, that you should be allowed to roam free. Gone were the infant class days of a blank page at the top for pictures, and a few lines below for your scrawl. This was an era of boundaries, a time to curb crayon skies of blue, yellow corner page suns shining on the startled stick person below. This was the brave new era of words, sentences, perhaps even meaning.

How many times did I sit, intense with concentration, with a twelve inch wooden ruler (that’s one foot if you only speak metric), clamped to the left side of my page? With my tongue sticking out, I would run the tip of my HB drawing pencil from the very top of the page to the very bottom. It was serious business. It had to be at right angles to the horizontal lines across the page; not a line that waved or juddered. Any error could get you a telling off, even a missed playtime – sitting in the outer circle of hell at your desk, hearing the cries of joy from those playing tag or bulldogs on the nearby playground.

I hated drawing margins. It was such a pointless task, sent to punish those who had more important things to do with their incredible young life. It was torture and unfair, and the die was already loaded against me drawing straight by the non transparent, wooden ruler!

But the nonsense of then, can actually make some sense now …especially when the boredom of having to do it is far, far away in the dream of childhood. I now appreciate a margin on a page, put numbers or bullet points in them, notes of what I need to include or delete. How many times have they saved my mind from calcification when that person, with two thousand more words than me a day, is given the floor in an MSTeams call. The margin has allowed me to cling to consciousness with my scrawly doodles of flowers and cats and trees.

Moreso, I have come to appreciate the simple beauty of this sacred space, where stillness and silence collect, through the deliberate creation of a margin of space. Now I know that margins, are good for me. Sometimes my day wants to run headlong, at full speed from waking to falling asleep exhausted. More often it has a steady, but relentless pace, without a pause. Meeting to meeting, task to task. Do, do, do. Never just be, be,be.

I find that if I stop, take my time, look at my planned day and add in a margin or two, between the tasks and events, I can actually pace my day and walk through it. What was a mind numbing activity, drawing margins with a wooden ruler, has now become a mindful one. One that helps me to find the rests between the beats of the day. Times to pause, rest, take a breath. Times to get up and walk, to make a cuppa, to hug the dog. Times to message a friend, walk the avenue, look at the big wide sky. Doing somethings that are not that deeply dramatic, but oh so simply significant.

(1) Luisella Planeta https://pixabay.com/users/sweetlouise-3967705/ accesses 19 07 24