Working the Margins

All of us work on the margins, pretty much all the time.

On the margins of life there are risks, threats, chances, opportunities, accidents, mistakes, miscues, plans, goals, benchmarks, for the good and bad. We all live and die in these webs and externalities, all the time. Some of the outcomes are more central, others more peripheral or tangential. They can all affect us temporarily or for the long term.

Some of us take part in the planning and scheming in how those outcomes turn out more than others. Those that take active choices with more power and control have more centralized parts and positions within the flows and processes of how things develop. But there are always the sides, the edges, of all angles, no matter how core the principle or act. There are margins.

 

Within those margins are the players, who are us. Some of us are found more along the sidelines; we who are marginal.

And, along those margins of life and death are some of us, the marginal players who affect how things play out.

Are you of the central kind or are you marginal? I feel like all of us slip in between the center and the margins, depending on the subject and the issue.

Also, marginal is in the eye of the beholder, it is subjective to who is acting and who is being acted upon.

Law enforcement, some state, work primarily with the bottom 10 percent of society. These are the margins within which they work.

In each community, in each neighborhood, town and county, culture and nation, there are the marginal.

We are they much of the time. 

And many of us are marginal in our pursuits, too.

Stories of our life.