Marginal Orthogonal Strategies & Rituals
(or) How to zig when everyone seems to zag
Bilbo Baggins observed he “[felt] thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread” and Son of a Took, hard same my short king. Happy 2026!
While our poet hobbit friend was feeling the lingering effects of an unnaturally long life brought on by a cosmically cursed evil artifact, I’m mostly just a little tired. I’m a middle-aged, overweight, independent designer with young kids. I don’t eat as well as I should, or sleep enough, or exercise as much as my body needs (working on that part lately). I just found out I’m remarkably B-12 deficient — “the lowest number I’ve ever seen in an adult male!” my doctor says nonchalantly without breaking eye contact. I’m often stressed about money, but more often stressed about time. Like, literally, how is anyone getting everything done? I end most days bewildered by how little I got accomplished, how much is left to do, and how inadequately I’m equipped to do it.
In light of the scraped-ness of it all, I’ve naturally been thinking a lot about margin — how I’m aiming to be the just right amount of butter, smoothly and gently spread over warm, fresh bread. And how does one actually do that at a regular cadence, over a long period of time? What does it take to make margin consistently?
The margin’s where all the space is
My dotcomrade Shawn Blanc puts it eloquently — “Margin isn’t a luxury. It’s what allows you to breathe before breaking.” To breathe before breaking. No scraping. No fighting. No angry, kiki-shaped verbs. What a luxury to have room to spread out and “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.”
Speaking of space, my wife and I have spent a good deal of time and sweat equity turning our little quarter acre suburban yard into a series of “outdoor rooms” we can enjoy. The aim was to make our home a place we don’t want to escape from (at least the outside of it, miles to go before we sleep inside). But I’ve lamented many times how I want to pause more often and actually enjoy our yard, not just work in it. More breathing before breaking. Because when this particular soft animal body gathers itself around the firepit to watch the embers go gray while my kids laugh and play, I feel rich, despite the banking evidence to the contrary. And I want more of that, please. In every area.
Angling for a more gentle way
Nearly 100 years ago Buckminster Fuller observed, “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Thankfully, the new models just keep on coming. And while it’s mostly true that no one’s coming to save you, that also means no one’s coming to stop you. So we can probably all design the models for our lives with a bit more agency and flexibility than we’ve been doing.
If Bucky was right — “Don’t fight forces; use them.” — and Bilbo was right — “I need a holiday. A very long holiday.” where does that leave us, smack dab in the middle of more cultural and technological upheavals than we can count? How do we find margin when the world is on fire and it feels like the walls are closing in?
I scrawled this little poem piece in a 2025 journal:
I want to be a craftsman,
not an engine.
To bend and sway in the breeze,
not fight and break in conflict.
One of the primary principles of Judo’s “Gentle Way” is seiryoku zen’yō — the concept of maximum efficient use of energy, or, to put it more succinctly: maximal efficiency, minimal effort. This plays out practically in martial arts by using your opponent’s energy and momentum against them.
[Resisting] a more powerful opponent will result in your defeat, whilst adjusting to and evading your opponent’s attack will cause him to lose his balance, his power will be reduced, and you will defeat him. This can apply whatever the relative values of power, thus making it possible for weaker opponents to beat significantly stronger ones. — Kanō Jigorō, founder of Judo
I look at most of the prevailing cultural norms in America and think, “Nope! Don’t want that.” The stress, the endless pointless busyness, comparison loops, heck, even the overt extractional capitalism of it all. But a prevailing mainstream culture is exactly the kind of more powerful opponent Jigorō was talking about — hard to resist, nearly impossible to defeat head on. I saw the best minds of my generation move to Silicon Valley to design social media Saw traps that are coming for every second of your life. And unfortunately, none of us are strong enough to fight this stuff head on. It’s all too damn sticky.
I find myself and my family opting out more and more. Going after fewer, better things. Impromptu meals with friends. Weekly library trips. Prioritizing memories with my family. Going to bed early instead of watching another episode. Amazingly waking up (earlier!) feeling rested. Walking in the woods. Making more room to eat, drink, and be merry. (And play Magic: the Gathering.) All of those things are, by nature, slow, unproductive (depending on who you ask), and, perhaps because of their inherent slowness, compounders of joy over time. They run counter to the pace, priorities, and products I’m being sold when I’m gobbling up The Feed™. But the slow stuff is where the life is.
The road less travailed
I’m half-joking half-serious with this post title. “Orthogonal” is one of my least favorite pieces of workplace tech jargon — You mean unrelated? Just say unrelated. — but it’s kinda useful here. Even though we use it in terms of things that are statistically independent, but still related, it literally means “at right angles”.
I want to come at the dominant mainstream culture at right angles. Not head on against the flow (because I’ll lose), but playing a completely different game on an adjacent plane that occasionally crosses the same field. And to do that I need margin, sure. A constant decluttering of my environment and my schedule. Better boundaries and self-control, saying “no” more — like Goethe said, “Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least”. But the best thing I’ve discovered for slowing down and choosing better things is creating rituals.
Having children is an amazing goad to create habits for your family, which in turn create the culture we live in. As much as I’d like to believe otherwise, my kids (currently 11 and 8½) are shaped more by what I do than by what I say. The things I do speak so loudly the people closest to me can’t hear what I say anyway. Rhythms and rituals build habits and reinforce values. They create those guardrails for consistent behavior, which create character over time. What we do becomes who we are.
I’m beginning to fully embrace that if my calendar doesn’t reflect something I say I value, I likely don’t value it. If I don’t make room for it, I don’t want it bad enough. So when we create personal and family rituals we fold a sort of scaffolding into our culture assembles to build on. Mini milestones to look forward to, and work toward together. We create the world we inhabit.
Some rituals we’ve adopted in our family over the past few years:
Friday Movie Night — doing this every week highlights how few truly good modern family movies there are, and has pushed us into the well of amazing films made before Netflix. (P.S. I knew it would be bad, but Harold and the Purple Crayon was truly one of the worst movies I have ever suffered through, but dad doesn’t always get to pick ’em.)
Sunday Documentary Night — nature, history, how things are made, biographies, we’ve been instilling a love of learning about the world because we value curiosity and education, and want our kids to as well. Half the time they suggest the documentary. “Dad, did you see there’s a new dinosaur documentary series?!”
Monday Morning Meeting — my wife and I sit down at our neighborhood work club to go over the week’s calendar, meal plan, finances, todos, etc. We don’t always get through the list, we’re often distracted by running into friends or immediately jumping into doing a task instead of just planning it, but it keeps us mostly on the same page, which is the secret sauce.
Candlelight Storytime — we started doing audiobooks on roadtrips, and that’s morphed into a once-a-week-ish bedtime transition with the kids. After dinner they get everything in their rooms (and their bodies) ready for sleepy time, then we turn off all the lights in the house, light a few candles, snuggle up on the couches in the living room, and listen to an audiobook for a half hour or so. It is the absolute best transition out of a hectic day. (We’re currently listening to Katherine Rundell’s Rooftoppers after finishing her latest Impossible Creatures and The Poisoned King.)
And a ritual I’ve been trying solo:
Daily Local Hikes — in the Fall last year we shifted from full-time homeschooling to the kids being in schools that can better meet their needs. I take them to school in the morning, and my last drop-off is coincidentally six minutes from the entrance to Paris Mountain State Park, where you can typically find me in the morning doing a quick two-miler on one of the upper trails deeper into the park. (Definitely getting my money’s worth from South Carolina’s $99 All Park Pass.)
The connective tissue between all these rituals is simply slowing down. If we’re going to listen to a story before bed, the kids have to get their rooms cleaned up. If they don’t do that before dinner, we can’t have a story. It forces introspection, planning, preparing, remembering what they want, and acting in a way that brings those things into existence. Which is honestly the same things I need to do to be prepared for our Monday Morning Meeting. Or have a healthy body as I age. I have to slow down to get what I want. I have to make room. And I have to do it consistently over time.
Do we do all these things perfectly on a rigid schedule? No. Life happens. Sometimes we have to remind the kids that rituals like Movie Night are a privilege, not a right, and they can lose them when they get in trouble. I was deathly ill for half of February. Spring Break(s) split between two schools threw wrenches in things. But again, the goal isn’t perfection (we’re not machines! They fight flexibility!) the goal is living a life that doesn’t kill us, or make us want to kill ourselves. As Bilbo says, “Go back? No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!”