Margin for magic

I am currently in the midst of NaNoWriMo, an attempt to write 50,000 words of fiction in 30 days. For me it is all consuming, so why am I writing about margins? There is a magic that can come from placing myself in front of my novel, with my fingers on the keyboard. Sometimes it takes awhile, but in the course of this month my imagination will send more to my typing fingers than I ever thought possible -- but I have to give my imagination a margin -- I have to sit at the keyboard and do the work, even when it takes a long time.

Similar in my family life in the concept of quality family time. We do not always have quality time every time we are together, but the value in being together is that it can be wonderful. But if we never give it the time, it won't be. We are tempted to fill up our evenings with commitments and skip family dinners. It's true that sometimes our dinners are far from transcendent. Some one is mad at someone else, or the food isn't very good, or the conversation is boring. But sometimes we have a fabulous time together, we talk about interesting things, or learn something that we didn't know. Those are the dinners that I want to happen, but to experience them, we have to live through the other kind too. We have to provide a margin for the magic to happen.