Living on the Edge

Richard A. Swenson, in Margin: Restoring Emotional, Physical, Financial and Time Reserves to Overloaded Lives, offers a description of living on the margin, or the edge (financially, emotionally, food-wise, time-wise, etc.), and suggests some solutions for people in that precarious situation. The author is a physician who sees people every day who are marginless physically, psychologically and emotionally, and sometimes financially and other ways as well. Basically, the condition of living a marginless life is the condition of being in a state of pain:

Seeing people in pain is my job. . . . I am continually surrounded by pain. . . . Helping hurting people is the part of medicine I most enjoy. . . . At the end of a long day it is a satisfying feeling to know that I have alleviated the pain burden of the world just a little. The trouble is, pain today seems to be in an inflationary cycle (15).

Swenson's book is an attempt to extend his medical approach to people in pain to other areas in which people are suffering as the result of being and living at the margin or marginless. This "inflationary cycle of pain" the author says is the result of modern progress. He analyzes the role of progress in the creation of marginless lives, concluding that we have increasingly lost our faith in technology as a remedy for all our ills. Progress has speeded up and compressed every area of our lives, and created the kind of trapped feeling so many people have today, even those whose wealth

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f so much pain and fear. With respect to the question at the heart of the book, Swenson writes that "Our margin is negatively influenced by both the number and size of our problems. The more problems we have, the less margin we have. And the larger our problems become, the smaller our margin becomes" (53-54). Margin, then, can be translated into a sort of breathing space, or elbow room, between ourselves and the effects of our problems. A person will feel more relaxed if he knows that if he loses his job, he has at least a few months worth of savings to fall back on if it takes him a while to find a new job. But many people today do not have that margin. The same applies to many people with respect to feeding their families, or emotional and psychological margin. The person who has no margin will worry more, enjoy life less, be less able to love and be loved. The problems and resulting stress feed off one another until the person is under such pressure that a sort of madness ensues. This unhealthy state results from the loss of margin, "the space that once existed between ourselves and our limits" (55). The overload that brings about a marginless life can come in various forms, including overload created by an excess of activity

Category: Psychology - L