A Brief Return to a Past Life, or How (Really) Did I Get Here?

A couple of weeks ago, Mike handed me a book that had come free to his workplace.

“I doubt it’ll be very good,” he said, “but it’s a memoir about going to Columbia Law School.  I thought you might be interested.”

Maybe it’s the buddha-like peace that has descended on me as I prepare to give birth.  (Hardly an accurate description of my demeanor, but apparently the impression I give off in yoga class, where, I am told, women vie to practice next to me for my “beautiful energy.”  Frankly, I think this has more to do with the public-ness of a pregnant belly than anything I am or am not doing, and it makes me feel a little crowded.  So I guess buddha-like peace does not account for my reaction.)  Or maybe it’s the passage of time, both since I graduated from Columbia and since I taught law school.  Or maybe it’s just where I am in my life at this moment.

Whatever the reason, I did not take the book and throw it back at him.

In fact, I read it.  Not with great enjoyment, certainly not with fond nostalgia, if anything with more than a touch of jealousy that a division of Simon & Schuster would publish something with nothing new to say, said in an occasionally amusing but mostly unoriginal way.  (I realize one could say the same thing of my YogaMamaMe essays, should they ever be published, and this is no doubt a large part of what contributes to the jealousy.)

What I did find as I read was an ability to read more.  And to smile when I recognized certain professors.  And to sometimes nod without feeling a clenching sensation around my heart and a desire to run in the general direction of “west” so as to put a bit more distance between myself and that part of my life.

Because, I am realizing with a certain amount of awe, I no longer feel the need for that distance.  I seem to have picked up perspective somewhere along the line instead.

Stuck in Where I Used to Be

Let me be clear just in case I wasn’t already:  Law school was not a happy time for me.

Sure, I had a pretty great boyfriend through most of it until I picked one too many fights about how I couldn’t be expected to graduate and keep him in my plans without a ring around my finger — shouted in a way that virtually guaranteed he would have to be out of his mind to buy a diamond for this crazy woman any time soon.  And, to be honest, I didn’t do too badly academically.  I had a cool internship with Judge Louis Freeh that failed to turn into a post-graduation clerkship only by virtue of him being, um, appointed head of the FBI.  (I even applied for a job there and harbored thoughts of packing a gun until the misplaced sense of power that comes when you find out you passed the Bar dissipates into the far more obvious realization that a million other people have passed the Bar over the years and most of them are neither powerful nor particularly likeable.)  And, though I would never consider doing it again in a million years, I am thankful for having mastered the art of living in Manhattan.

On the other hand, what I mostly recall when I think about law school is lots of crying, almost as much drinking, and a general and increasingly depressing sense of despondency over the fact that I did not, in fact, really want to save the world.  Or even, to be honest, to work for Legal Aid.

This storyline of The Girl Who Hated Law School turned out to be a fine backdrop for the plot that developed after I graduated.  The Girl Who Hated Law School and Was One of Five People in Her Class to Graduate Without a Job randomly visits a friend in Washington, D.C. at the end of the summer and ends up with a clerkship on the Federal Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.  (This is very prestigious.  And was the result of nothing more than very, very, very good luck in being available to interview just as a classmate abandoned the clerkship to move back to New York.)  The Girl Who Hated Law School and Refused to Ever Work for a Firm lands a job at one of the best firms in D.C.  And even likes it a little bit, though most of the time not so much.  The Girl Who Quit Working at a Prestigious Law Firm After Less Than Two Years to Go to Graduate School gets a tenure track position teaching at a pretty decent law school in a pretty decent city where she eventually meets her more than merely “pretty decent” husband.  And truly does enjoy teaching.  For a few years.  Until she discovers yoga.

In short, my narrative of ongoing and inescapable misery has been a convenient support for the notion that my life turned around the second I started practicing yoga, discovered that all that unhappiness was due to the fact that law was the furthest thing from what I should be doing with my life, and realized for the first time that I didn’t know who I was — that I was alone and lonely and 36 years old — because I was ignoring what my heart told me to do and sticking with that oh-so-safe-and-convenient law degree.

And so, unthinkingly, I’d capitalize on what was becoming a sort of petrified cast of my life from 1990 to 2002.  (I’m thinking here of those plaster molds of our hands they made in kindergarten that are supposed to allow my parents to hold onto that sweet time in my life but are merely creepy when I come upon them buried behind a stack of old, yellowing photos in a forgotten cabinet somewhere.)

I would, for example, counsel anyone who mentioned within earshot that they were considering going to law school that they find something — anything — else to do with their life.  I’d cast my eyes down and mumble heroically that if Mike really wanted to stay home with Jake I could maybe see my way clear to working in a local firm, even though I plainly didn’t mean it.  I’d regale him with stories of my freelance work and the fascinating complexities of some point of law I was arguing and then assure him that, really, I was only doing it for the money.  (Okay, I do do it for the money, but it’s not nearly as unpleasant as I can convince myself it is.)

And then, somewhere along the line, a funny thing happened.  I read this book and I returned for the first time to those ugly hallways of my miserable law school years and I didn’t hyperventilate or start crying or run for my yoga mat or google past classmates so I could gloat over how all they have accomplished in the past 15 years is making partner at a law firm and look at me!

Instead, I was able to see how far I’ve come from Columbia Law without it all being about how wrong I was in to be there in the first place.

Let Your Path Have a Reason

I find myself about to write things that make it sound as if there is some predetermined path for each of us.  As if there is something called Fate that pushes us toward a particular outcome no matter how we might try to avoid it.  (Think Sliding Doors.  Or, I don’t know, a hundred movies and books and episodes of LOST.)  And I don’t mean to.

It’s not that I’m saying I was meant to spend twelve years of my life trying to make sense of a law school degree or my rather ill considered decision to go to law school at all.  I truly believe with a different start in life, with the freedom to see things through my own eyes instead of the eyes I was taught to see with, I might have chosen very differently.  I might have seen more options than school, graduate school, and — when I was desperately in need of escape — more graduate school.  Followed up by teaching graduate school.  I know for a fact that path was leading me nowhere, and that yoga was the jolt I need to (over time) toss it all out the window and start over.

But I’m also realizing that much of what we learn when we embrace the path forward is to forgive whatever bumps there were along the path behind us.  It got us to where we are, after all.  If that’s a good place, then we can’t discredit the choices we made that eventually got us to this good place.  If you’re not in a good place, then you need to recognize your power to make the choices that will bring you something happier.

In other words, we make choices even when we aren’t aware of it.  Even before we discover the power and the beauty of the ability to choose and the way it leads us down a path in a direction without a known end.

For example, when I chose to go to law school, my reasoning went something like this:  Everyone I know has a strong opinion about whether I should go to law school — some strongly in favor, some strongly against.  It is therefore something I must consider seriously.  My initial revulsion at the idea may actually be a reaction to the fact that my parents really, really want me to go.  Now that I am a great, grown-up twenty-three-years old I have to face the possibility that I am letting them control me by refusing to consider going to law school because they want me to as much as if I went to law school because they want me to.  Besides, I’m going to end up going eventually, so why not do it while I’m young?

Hence I found myself one night on the phone with my parents saying, “I’m going to Columbia Law School in the fall, but I’m not doing what you do.”  (Did I mention that both of my parents are lawyers?  Who else would nag their daughters to go to law school despite neither of them much loving their own careers?  “It’s prestigious,” my mother used to say with an extra sneer down her nose at any other profession, as — whatever that profession might be — it surely lacked the prestige of the law.  “Mom, do you know what people think of lawyers?” I would ask in genuine puzzlement.)

So the reasons I ended up there weren’t the greatest.  They were, in fact, the product of a person who had not been able to see or listen to her heart for at least the better part of her life.  And that is sad.  The fights I had about justice with classmates who cared far more for the opportunity at a six-figure salary were sad.  The longing way I used to listen to The Indigo Girls’ “Hammer and a Nail” as if someone who has never met me could articulate how much I wanted to have an impact on the world was sad.  Realizing as I participated in the Fair Housing Clinic my third year that I really wasn’t doing much good, considering my client had already been threatened and humiliated with racial epithets, was sad.  And, yes, graduating without a job because I was so dead set on public interest work, while filled with a certain surface bravado, was sad.

And, okay, I’ve mourned.  But I’ve also learned.  I’ve learned just how important it is to follow my heart.  I have a real, permanent gauge of just how dangerous it can be to pretend I don’t need to.  I have the reassurance — during those times when I look at myself working at home, living under the radar, discovering contentment in a life that doesn’t have much to distinguish it from a million other lives — that I have nothing to worry about, nothing to apologize for.  That I am truly where I am meant to be.

So, I’m thinking, not only can I not change the past, but if I truly want to embrace my path, I should grasp at the new notion that I wouldn’t change it even if I could.  Ooh.  I just shuddered for a moment there at the idea of going back, knowing what I know, and still sitting down on that first day of Legal Methods and sticking it out until I have a diploma in hand.  I’m not saying I want to do it all again.  But I’m saying it was the right thing to do.  Because it was the choice I made.

Where does this flood of acceptance and nonjudgment take me?

First of all, to a beautiful peace in my own soul.  There’s nothing harder than accepting and refusing to judge yourself, after all.

But it also takes me a profound step down the path of yogic learning.  Because it helps me stop analyzing my life, overthinking the choices, acting as if what I choose has anything to do with the ultimate outcome.  It brings me the peace of knowing that we should always try to choose from our hearts but that even if sometimes we don’t, it’s okay.  We will end up somewhere with the opportunity to make the heartfelt choice some other time.

And when that other time comes at the end of a long, frequently painful, but ultimately colorful twelve-year journey, it ends up being that much more burstingly joyful.

(In case you’re interested, the book that prompted this essay is called Ivy Briefs and if you’ve already been to law school it’s not going to tell you anything you didn’t already know. If you are considering law school it might make you chuckle a time or two but won’t tell you anything pretty much anyone else who has gone to law school will tell you.  But a quick google shows that many readers apparently disagree with me.  So you decide, if you have the inclination.)

Shanti, Shanti, Shanti — A Simple Chant for Peace

As I was preparing to write this essay this morning, I settled down to practice some yoga and meditation with a certain self-awareness.

I was reminded of my weeks living on the ashram in Colorado where a piece of me stood to the side and both giggled at and admired the me running around in an Indian-print skirt, bare feet, and dangling earrings.  I knew how right it felt and yet how strange it would appear to a me from several years before, as if the bridge between the moments of those me’s had disappeared and all that the old me could see was a gaping chasm between who I was then and this puzzling and certainly unhinged person I would become.

In short, I felt a grand sense of peace and pride that meditating makes sense to me now in a way it would not have fifteen years ago when I was sitting in dark lecture halls instead of on a yoga mat in my office bright with soon-to-be-spring sunshine.

And then it came to me.  The simple, beautiful chant I sing at the end of every yoga practice.  Shanti.  Shanti.  Shanti. Peace.

And that, I realized, was what I wanted to write about.  What I have written about.  What I’d like to offer here.  For when you practice or when you meditate or when you wake up in the morning — or for simply right now to see how it feels.

Shanti Chanting Instructions

Tagged as: choosing your path, Columbia Law School, Ivy Briefs, law school, yoga and motherhood