The cell phone rings, reaching into the dark cubbyhole to shake me from my cozy cloud of dreams. Flopping my arm into midair as if it too was in a mind-numbing sleep, my fingers eventually close in on the insistent culprit. Blinking the blur from my vision, I lift my phone from the nightstand. It’s not yet 7:00 a.m., and my day’s already plagued by a robocall on my business line.
Always the eager one, my brain immediately jumps to attention and starts its morning calisthenics — why do they keep calling, what is their motive, how can I get my phone to stop putting unwanted calls through at these unwelcome hours.
Hoping to find my way back into my comfy cocoon, I lay with eyes closed, envisioning a crisp blank page to restart my day. Try as I might, my mind continues to do what it thinks best, contemplating various scenarios, guessing at motives, making judgments, and jumping to conclusions about all of the distractions that I choose to let in.
My focus then shifts to this tendency to spend energy, lose time, and distract myself with lesser things. It’s not a new revelation, but this time I see it as scrawling trivial notes in life’s margins when I could (and should) instead be scripting a more meaningful page. Devoting this much attention to faceless extras merely casts shadows on my purpose and draws the spotlight away.
Each day the choice is mine: I can scribble in and clutter up the narrow margins, or I can dive in and focus on my lines and the plot of my own story. How grand that story becomes is largely up to me.
Life is too precious to be living in the margins.
© 2020 HSE
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