Last weekend I went to the garage to finish up an art project the wife and I have been working on. As I was looking for some materials I noticed some camping gear laying around that I had been meaning to put up on the high shelving. I sorted through it and climbed the ladder and put it up. As I did I noticed 4 or 5 boxes of stuff I have been carrying around since college so I took them down and thought, “I should go through this and clean this out.” I had boxes of my old college papers. At one point I was going to be a teacher so I kept all my papers, notes, tests…etc. As I began recycling all that paper I began to notice my scribblings in the margins of my class notes. In one class I was talking to the girl next to me, making jokes about the professor, asking what she was up to during the weekend. As the class went on I was clearly trying to get a date. In another class the margins had songs, poems, thoughts all scribbled along the margins. There were love notes to a girlfriend, lyrics from a band I was in to at the time, doodles of a chair being thrown at my Russian History professor, lists of supplies I needed to get for a date night with Italian cooking, more comments between me and someone else in Geology class about life, the weekend…etc. As I thumbed through what was interesting to me – what felt alive to me was the margins. That is where I was living; all the stuff in the middle seemed relatively pointless.
In the margins my long term girlfriend and I were breaking up, getting back together, forgiving, falling in love again…etc. In the margins I was struggling to write lyrics, to find my voice, to try and say something beautiful. In the margins I seemed to be constantly searching for who I was. In the margins I was going on dates under the stars, playing guitar at a coffee shop for the first time, getting frustrated with feeling stuck, cracking jokes about a night spent drinking and Howling at the moon, laughing about dancing like a fool at the local bar….all of this was happening in the margins as I was trying very hard to live….well….in the middle. The middle was important to me or at least I was told it should be important to me, and I believed it. I liked that guy in the margins, he was far more interesting more full of life, more in touch with passion. If I could go back I would tell him to forget the middle. The middle is where passionate and wild hearts go to die bogged down in an ocean of false “have to’s” masquerading as real life. At some point I learned this the hard way and gave up the middle and jumped into the margins.
I speak to people and dear friends all the time who just can’t do it. The real parts of them are still left in the margins as they let job, responsibilities, bills, …etc take up the majority. They are all so tired – so worn down it makes me sad. When I touch a nerve they often shout back at me, “it is not so easy okay! I have a family and bills to pay.” Yes, I know, of course I know but if our children only see us as tired people living tired lives what is the lesson we teach them about life? We can say all we want, “You should follow your heart!, follow your dreams!, Enjoy your life!” what is the real message we are sending to them when they see us day after day selling our own life so cheaply? Our actions say having a mediocre job or a “secure” life in the middle is more important than passion, more important than taking risks or living at high volume. What do your actions say? What parts of your life are in the margins? Start looking at what your soul scribbles in the margins of your life, just pay it some kind attention, and it will lead you home.
Blog note: Thanks to all for the kind emails and encouragement about this blog. When things get quiet sometimes it is just because the muse isn’t there. It doesn’t always mean I am depressed or closing the blog down. I often take walks and then sit down at the keyboard to work on my book or a post but the muse is nowhere to be found so I pick up my guitar, cook something on the stove, wrestle with the boys, or read a book. Recently that has been alot of what I have been doing. For some reason since August I haven’t felt like writing or I guess, more honestly, I just didn’t have anything to say. Sometimes the soul needs a little downtime. Anyways thanks for the emails but nothing to worry over. More importantly to me is the point that this blog means something to many of you, enough to write me about it, post a comment, or miss it when there hasn’t been a post in awhile so many thanks to you all. ~ T
