Margin

By Pastor Paul Gauche

Today’s Word: ‘Margin’ as in… creating space, emptying to make room for what’s to come, de-cluttering to provide room for the essential. We can do this by settling into simpler, less frantic routines, observing more time between activities, scaling our to-do list to fewer items, and limiting social media.

Oh yeah, that. Ouch.

I’m going out on a limb here, but I think you need a break. Could you use some time to renew? Could you benefit from stepping out of the usual rhythms of work into more generative spaces to breathe, slow down, or even stop? Can you set aside a good portion of a day for rest, renewal, restoration, and re-imagination? Could you use some margin in your life?

Let me ask you another question. Have you ever been too busy driving to stop for gas? Have you ever rushed around the house looking for your keys or sunglasses only to realize your keys are in your hand and your glasses are on your head? Come on; I know you have! The antidote to this is creating margin, a little extra space on either side of the busy middle of our over-busy lives to rest.

I decided to run an experiment. Every Today’s Word post contains 351 words. Limiting each post to 351 words creates a kind of margin that hopefully prevents clutter. The physical margins on my paper are preset at 1.0. Once this post was written, I expanded the margins on both the left and right sides. I wanted to create more margin. By increasing the margin, I decreased the number of words on a page. Hmmm. There’s seemed to be an important lesson in here someplace. More margin, less busyness, more space, less clutter. Less is more! And sometimes more is actually less.

Thriving Reflections:

++ What part of your life seems overly busy? How is that busyness impacting you?

++ Describe an instance when you said “no” to something that created a healthy margin.

++ What changes would allow you to find more margin?

++ How does tending to margin help you thrive?

#100days50words

#Thriv’ëra

Paul Gauche is the Pastor of Life Transitions at Prince of Peace. His posts are part of his #100days50words project, where he blogs about a different word each week. You can follow his project on Instagram (@pgauche) or his blog, Thriving Rhythms.