I often wonder where it came from, this tendency in me.

No doubt it was there when I was five, on the playground at school, hanging out on the Weebly-Wobbly that was close to the surrounding fence.

I know it was there in middle school, when I would hug the walls walking from class to class.

It’s that force that pushes me to a back corer at parties, to the back row in meetings and classrooms, into the dark corner at dances.

Now, in midlife, I feel it strongly, because it also represents a way of life.

Living in the margin.

You know it because you never feel quite ‘in’ wherever you are. You can be active and involved in a million things, and despite the busyness, you rarely feel at home in any of them.

Living in the margin is the place of being half-way in- which equates to being half-way out.

Living in the margin has a profound impact on identity because, in some ways, it is a hedge against identity.

When you live fully in to something, when you locate yourself in an ideological or sociological center, you identify yourself. You let yourself be known by the sphere you’ve embraced. This also means you can be criticized and rejected for the very same allegiance. And yet, by living in the middle, you also let people know who you are, and provide them grounds to grasp aspects of the real you.

I suppose much of living in the margin has to do with safety. If people don’t know clearly who you are and what you are about, you won’t have to spend vast amounts of time or energy defending yourself. More importantly, you might avoid detection. You might slip through the apprehension of everyone around you.

And you might slip through comprehension by those who also love you the most, and want the best for your life.

What you will miss though, living on the margins, and not fully in the middle of anything, is the benefits of belonging and growing with a group. You will miss feeding on the fruits of sowing with, sitting with, talking with, waiting with, arguing with, standing with, sweating with, and building with.

The fruits of being fully in.

Being loved depends, in large part, on being known, and being known is product of people knowing who we are and what we are about. It goes without saying that if people nothing about who you are and what you are about, you may very well just be a challenge to love- a challenge to appreciate and value.

Marginal living is the “politically correct” personality of our times, because the halfway-in man is actually the mostly-out man- man afraid to align himself with particular preferences, particular ethics and particular beliefs because the propriety police of this age (and most any age) scorn the certain soul.

The one who lives fully from the inside out, from inner certainties not impacted by socially prescribed subjectivities, is unafraid of correctness and free to enter fully into interests. Such a life is enabled for action and released from reaction. The marginal man cannot know such living.

Safety may appear to lie in the margin, but love and life are found by the fully in.

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Image Credit: I’m All In !!!! by Ray Dumas via Flickr. Creative Commons license.