As a bookish person, I know about margins: the white space surrounding the block of text on the book-page invites notes and comments. I value it, and even though I rarely mark up my books – and then only lightly, in pencil - it’s there, like an open door, except that it’s I who can create what will be found beyond the doorway.
When I’m doing my own writing I always leave margins around the edges of the pages – space on which to write further thoughts or the essential questions that lead onwards into more research and story-development. Sticky notes, which I use copiously, are a form of margin. On the computer it’s the sidebar and footnotes.
Margins, therefore, are places where creativity can happen – thinking and reflection and the insights that are like suddenly opening flowers. Because these afterthoughts (side-thoughts?) are close to the text that they relate to it’s possible to see the links and the flow of the idea, to draw lines, to sketch little diagrams.
There are other kinds of margins. For me the wall-spaces between pictures are margins, open areas that give me a sense of spaciousness. Similarly I value margins in time, in the pace and rhythm of my days. From time to time I step aside from the day’s routine and commitments – the block of text – and into a few minutes of loose time, unassigned, unprogrammed moments in which I can gaze out the window, listen to some music, read ….
There are margins in my surroundings. In the house where I lived before I moved to this apartment I had a spare room and a basement and a carport. Here in the apartment everything is more tightly packed, but a few empty inches on a bookshelf or in a kitchen cupboard give me the chance to rearrange – the freedom to rearrange.
All these physical spaces are also margins of the mind and mood. The open areas of space and time provide me with flexibility and freedom. When my day is too full I feel boxed-in, pressured, controlled – unfree. Margins are about mental health.
I’m finding that in old age some of the margins – those that offer freedom of choice – decrease. The boundary beyond which lies the “I can’t” territory is closing in. In the sense that margins are about flexibility, room for choices and options, the margins are narrower now.
But those that remain give me room to think, to imagine, to move, to stretch.