Life in the Margins

I've been thinking lately about the way I deal with time. I'm well aware that I'm not a truly busy person. I don't have children or a husband or (at the moment) a full-time job. I have all the time in the world, but I stress about time. Maybe my anxiety stems from a semi-subconscious awareness that I waste a lot of it. I especially stress out about delays, about changed plans, about the unexpected. I think I learned in college to micro-manage every minute of my time and just never really stopped, or at least never lost the feeling that I ought to be doing it. A couple of weeks ago, a chance acquaintance was talking about creating margins in life. Showing up early, leaving late, scheduling extra time around planned events, just to see what shows up during those times. The idea resonated with me immediately as a solution to some of that anxiety and as one way to make sure I was fully engaged in the life I have right now.

It reminded me of some writing advice I found in Fiction Writer's Brainstormer by James V. Smith, Jr. He says, "Most of the time we are so lacking in self-awareness that we are not aware of moving around in a fog. We let the noise of daily life overwhelm us. We sink into trivial things like gossip and news items that have spawned countless talk shows without adding much enlightenment to our lives. Or we drift along in the raging torrent of racket created by our popular culture" (35). He goes on to challenge his readers to wake up. Listen. Absorb. Take notes. Explore possibilities. Engage in the world around you rather than just passively taking it in. I have a post-it note bookmarking that page, and along the top I wrote in capital letters. "WAKE UP." I honestly don't blame television or popular culture. It's up to me to decide whether I'm going to just  take what's handed to me or wrestle with it and dissect it and find what's valuable in it. It's up to me to cultivate the life of the mind so that it can actually produce something worthwhile. 

Back to margins. A few days after encountering the idea of creating margins, I ran into a living example. Sometimes I'll pop into the 24 hour Walmart on my way home from house church on Monday nights, usually around elevenish. Night owl that I am, wide awake and several hours away from bedtime, I do more relaxed browsing than businesslike shopping. I wasn't thinking about this at the time, but my occasional Monday night shopping is a naturally occurring margin in my life. That night I found my way back to the Sporting Goods section, since I was planning a weekend camping trip. There was an employee shelving some things, a guy who looked to be around my age. I asked him a question about something and ended up having a chat with him about my upcoming camping trip. He was pleasant, kind, and decidedly Southern. Moments after he moved on to another aisle to continue his work, a folding table he'd just set up fell over with a resounding crash. He came running back around the corner and said with evident relief, "Good Lord, I thought something had done fallen on you!" I cannot describe how adorable it was. After I'd finished my shopping, I went out to the car and put my grocery bags in the trunk. Somewhere between the trunk and the driver's side door, something terrible happened to my car key. I don't know how it happened, but the key was badly bent. I did my best to bend it back and managed to get the door open. No matter how I tried, though, it wouldn't start the car. I was starting to feel a little panicky. I wasn't sure who to call, since all of my friends are gainfully employed and try to go to bed at a decent hour. And then it dawned on me. I had a new friend in Sporting Goods who loved hunting and fishing and rock climbing and other such outdoor endeavors. Surely he would have some idea of what to do. Sure enough, he declared with great confidence, "This is Walmart, they got everything!" He took a hammer and knocked that thing straight within seconds, then decided that it still had a little twist to it and took care of that problem with a pair of pliers. My key was right as rain, and it started the car with no problems. As I turned it in the ignition, I chuckled to myself and thought about how well that "margin-making" had turned out for me. This is not to say that making margins and connecting with people will always have direct and visible benefits. I don't think that's the point. But I do know that if I hadn't stopped to chat with him, it probably wouldn't have occurred to me to go back in the store for help.

I don't want to turn this into a New Years Resolution type thing, and I think it's a little cheesy to "challenge my readers." Maybe I just want to encourage you to try a little of what I'm trying; create space in your life for the unexpected and see where it takes you. Step back from the routines of your daily life and try to see things you didn't see before. Perhaps even try doing that literally: lie down on the floor of your living room and look at everything from that perspective. Look at the city or town you live in and try to see patterns and shapes and lines you've never noticed. Try to notice something new about someone you see every day. Really make it a point to take on the ideas that come your way and figure out what you think about them. Make connections between concepts, and ask people around you what they think. Don't just absorb; create. I don't know what you'll find, or what I will. I have a notion that's the point. 

Time for a bit of a change...

I have a little business to attend to in this post. A friend and very faithful reader of mine left a comment on my Facebook note protesting the name of this blog (Diary of a Flop). I had been toying with the idea of a change but had resisted it for mostly sentimental reasons, which I will describe as briefly as possible. In defense of the name, it was never intended as a self-deprecation. A dear friend from college was once struggling to find the right word to describe his perception of me. After a few moments, he settled on "flop." I flop when I walk. When I'm speaking, I flop my arms around flamboyantly for emphasis. I flop when I hug people, I flop when I sit down, and I flop when I laugh. Granted, this was all a comical, affectionate conversation between friends. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized I agreed with him. After that conversation, I wrote the following: "I'm an odd, funny person who flops through her life doing the best she can, and sometimes making a clumsy mess of everything. As a writer, I must admit that most of my best work just 'flops out'." I was pleased with the way I'd managed to draw all the disparate elements of my life into a whole, to discern a pattern. Sure, it was a pattern of awkwardness and that odd balance of success and failure that accompanies growing up. It was my life, though, and I liked the feeling of embracing it with a sort of wry, self-aware humor. The title resonated with me then, but time has passed and I do feel I've outgrown it. Of course, I still wouldn't be willing to change the name unless I had a new one that I really felt good about. However, I've been posting my "Small Happenings" Facebook statuses (or statusae, as I like to call them) for quite a while now, and people seem to like them. Honestly, I like them too. They're a way to train myself to see the details in the world around me. Anyway, what is this blog but a sort of expansion of my "Small Happenings" statuses? It fits, I think.

In Underland

I'm not sure how to begin this story. Suffice it to say that if writing is a way of processing experience, that's what I intend to do in this post. I'd like for it to be beautiful in a poignant sort of way. I'd like for it to be meaningful, to draw a thread of connection between events and ideas. Sometimes a writer achieves that without consciously trying to, but I have no motivating concept, no point that I'm trying to draw from what I'm going to relate. It's just what happened, and it made me sad and thoughtful and confused.

I took an Amtrak train to Atlanta on Friday to spend the day with the family I worked for last year and their homeschool co-op on a field trip to Legoland. We enjoyed our day, and the family I'd come with stayed in Atlanta while I caught the train back to Clemson with another family from the same co-op. My seat-mate was this family's little boy, John Mark. He spent most of the beginning of the trip making sure I was watching him play his Nintendo and the rest of it asking me if I was hungry. He desperately wanted to be taken to the dining car, and his parents weren't keen on the idea. Much as I sympathized with his deep longing, I didn't budge.

He'd finally quieted down a little, and I was reading a magazine. It was about a quarter to nine when the train began to slow, then stopped. For the first minute or so, no one seemed to notice, but as time stretched on, the passengers grew restless. Someone returning from the dining car said he had seen fire out beside the train tracks. At one point, an attendant hurried through the car carrying three or four fire extinguishers.

As the minutes dragged on, information filtered through the car. I had no way of knowing how accurate it was, because there was only one brief announcement on the PA system explaining that we had hit a car and were waiting for the police to release the train. The man across the aisle from me talked to some policemen in the dining car and told us that 2 people had been killed. Around 11:00 I fished out a notepad and a pen and wrote for the next half hour or so:

There's something particularly tragic in train deaths. Maybe it's the relentlessness of a train's movement. They can't stop. Train drivers can't keep from killing people. There is no indication at all of what to expect. It's like Jill and Eustace and Puddleglum in the boat in Underland.

I wrote down details about my surroundings, like how unexpectedly kind the man across the aisle was to offer me a sip of the very last cup of coffee they handed out before the dining car closed. Or how I looked over at John Mark, curled up in his seat asleep, and thought that children look like angels when they're sleeping. How when you're sitting in a stopped train at night, you can drive yourself half crazy trying to tell if it's inching along slowly, staring out a pitch black window until you're dizzy, convincing yourself you can see the silhouettes of the trees moving against the sky. The hum of the idling engines and the air conditioning and hushed conversations.

We sat completely still for four hours. The relief when the train finally started moving was beyond words, as was the frustration and anger when it stopped again only a few minutes later so that the crew could clear the wreckage of the vehicle off the front of the train. We were stopped for another forty five minutes. I was beyond being sad or pensive; I just wanted to be home. There were a few moments where I really felt like I was never going to, like I was just going to be on that train for eternity. And at the same time I was disgusted with myself for being concerned with a delay when people had died. We made it to the station in Clemson at ten minutes after three. It took me another twenty minutes or so to drive home, on the phone with my best friend so I wouldn't fall asleep at the wheel. I dropped into bed at a quarter to four, twenty four hours after I had gotten up to catch the train to Atlanta.

I've spent the last several days processing exactly what it is that I'm supposed to feel about the whole affair. I found out Saturday that three people had been killed, not two. I don't know if I should be more affected by it or less. Honestly, I don't know how affected I am. I only know that it has meaning, and that I was compelled to write it down. Maybe it'll begin to make more sense to me when I come back to read this later.