Meaning Archives - Page 3 of 4 - Lawyers With Depression

Law and the Human Condition

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Many people who went to law school didn’t have a burning passion to be a lawyer. They did so because they didn’t know what else to do with their undergraduate degrees. Some went on to find and embrace their calling as lawyers, some did not. Some have left the profession. Most have not.

Those who haven’t left, but think of doing so – sometimes daily – are legion. Forbes Magazine reported that a full 38 percent of attorneys say they somewhat regret their career choice. Additionally, Harvard Law School counselors estimate that 20% to 30% of active attorneys are considering another career.

I recently bumped into the Valedictorian of my law school class. She told me she had chucked her law career awhile ago, went back to school and was now an elementary school teacher. She had gone from power suit blues to L.L. Bean greens. When I told other lawyer pals about this, they weren’t shocked – they envied her.

Recently, I had lunch with a contract lawyer at the Oyster Bar in New York City. He had come from a long line of lawyers and judges in his family who encouraged him to go to law school. After graduating from Harvard Law School, he worked seven years at a large Manhattan firm. As we slurped our Clam Chowder, he told me that he didn’t know one person that was happy being a lawyer. That if they could get out, they would. Now it may be that misery loves company, but let’s be honest: there are a lot of unhappy folks out there. Lawyers walk the halls of justice and corridors of power – or maybe just look out of a Starbucks window – and wonder why they just can’t turn things around and just feel happy.

I don’t think job dissatisfaction is unique to lawyers; it’s the daily fare for most Americans. A recent MSNBC article read: “Americans hate their jobs more than ever in the past 20 years with fewer than half saying they are satisfied.” People, deep down, feel broken and vulnerable, but just have to keep going in order to survive in this tough economic climate.

My friend and psychologist, Richard O’Connor, in his book, Undoing Perpetual Stress, captures the daily plight of the average American struggling to make to make it:

“Here is where I leave trying to explain physiology [how stress and depression affect the brain] and turn to something I know about – life as it’s lived in the USA. I get to hear all about it from my patients, a wonderful cross-section – aging Yankees, rising Yuppies, farm and factory workers, teens and seniors. Most people are living with, I think, a fear of fear. There is a sense that something is fundamentally wrong with the way we are living our lives, but a reluctance to look closely at that. We know deeply that we’re in serious trouble, but we live our daily lives as if everything is fine, whistling past the graveyard. We try to purchase inner peace, knowing perfectly well that’s impossible, but not seeing an alternative. Or we tell ourselves that someone will figure out what’s wrong someday, and until then we’ll just have to wait. Or we’ll simply live our lives later. Or we may believe for a while in the latest fad – a political leader, a spiritual leader, a self-help guru. We try to follow what the fad tells us, but it usually doesn’t do much for our troubles, so we give up and try to forget again.”

I give a lot of speeches across the country to groups of lawyers about stress, anxiety and depression. It’s always interesting how many contact me later and say that while they aren’t depressed per se, life isn’t going very well. There have been plenty of times I’ve considered – or it’s been suggested to me – that I consider changing the name of my website from https://www.lawyerswithdepression.com/ to something like www.lawyersdealingwithalotofshit.com. No, it’s not a real website so don’t click on it. The point is that lawyers are stuck not only dealing with the high decibel life as a lawyer, but also the everyday crap that all Americans must try to handle everyday.

Dr. O’Connor helps us to understand the breadth of the problem for the average American:

“Then there are those without a diagnosis: I can’t estimate the number who feel their lives are out of control because they can’t lose weight, they can’t stop procrastinating, they can’t get out of debt, they can’t speak up for themselves – “soft addictions,” bad habits that make them feel miserable and ashamed. They are still others who are like the living dead – numb to their own existence, busy working, buying, doing – feeling vaguely empty but compelled to continue, too busy even to sit and look at their lives. Their depression has grown on them so insidiously that it feels normal; they believe life stinks, and there’s nothing they can do about it. And finally there are the rest of us, who still have to find confidence, connection, love, who have to raise children without guidance in a crazy world, often watch our parents lose their minds if they live long enough, and wonder about the meaning and importance of our lives. Even those of us supposedly without emotional problems, there is still the nagging fear that we’re faking it, just making it up as we go along, and praying we don’t stumble.”

This quote isn’t meant to bum anyone out – okay maybe it’s a tad bit melancholic. However, I would argue, not morose. I think it’s a true picture of the dilemma that most people deal with everyday as they cross at the traffic light pounding out on their Blackberry’s, yell into the old cell phone above the din of traffic noise or wonder ten times a day where they’re going to find the energy to deal with it all.

What makes lawyers different from the average Joe (and Jane)?

I would argue that there are a couple of things. First, the adversarial nature of the profession: unless you are into slugging it out everyday (unfortunately, I’ve had opponents who thrive on this), the law will wear you down physically and emotionally. Second, it is a career that is made up – maybe to a degree that few others are – of the mentality that you’re either a “winner” or a “loser.” Third, much of the public has a murmuring resentment or outright disdain for lawyers.

What to do about all of this? On this score let it be clear that I am not speaking to you from the mountain top, but from the valley. I struggle with these problems – and the potential antidotes – every day. But, I will give it a whirl.

First, recognize that many people are in the same boat as you. If you recognize that you are not alone in feeling the way you do, it can ease your burden. Some of this stuff is just the human predicament. Most people have a difficult time navigating through life. Chalk it up as a part of the deal we all signed on for when we were born into this troubled world.

Second, change your thinking. I call this the “stressed-out-lawyer” myth. This doesn’t contradict what I’ve said earlier; the point is that lawyers compound their pain by telling themselves — at virtually every moment of the day — how out of control they are. These thoughts, which a mental commentary on reality, – just plain out don’t help. We need to be more constructive in our thoughts. You’ll have to make the effort on this one.

Third – and I will never tire of tooting this horn – exercise. We can’t ever forget that we are essentially animals with high powered brains. The law jacks up our bodies with all sorts of high voltage situations we must confront. We must find a way to discharge this energy or it will wear our batteries out. Your poor body is literally screaming out to you to get rid of the stress before it eats away at your health. As the Nike commercials say, “Just Do It!”

Where does the Rat Race Lead Us To?

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Lawyers are very busy people. They multi-task like a short order cook flipping pancakes in a busy diner. First or second gear is simply not an option.

Speed becomes a large problem for the depressed lawyer. The murky bog of depression short circuits a lawyer’s capacity to move, think and act quickly; everything takes longer and is incredibly more difficult to accomplish. We see our work getting away from us, but are pinned down in a foxhole. Depression is spraying bullets at us as we feel them whizzing by our heads. So we stay stuck in this foxhole, unable to gain traction to meet our daily demands.

I think there’s a couple different ways to look at the lack of productivity in our work; whether it’s due to depression or not. Since you’re reading this blog, your difficulty in pumping out the paperwork is likely due, at least in part, to depression. It may also be that you just don’t like your job, the type of law you practice or are even dream of quitting the profession. What the precise cause or causes are need to be sorted out with a good therapist and wise friends.

For example, is the work slow down due to a neurochemical mix-up in your brain affecting your ability to concentrate? Or, is it a general malaise which suggests that you’re just burnt out and tired of all the bullshit? They’re really different animals.

Depression treatment, because it involves a real impairment in our ability to function as lawyers, must involve care which tries to return us to some normal or pre-depression levels of functioning. I like to imagine it as the ascent of a diving bell to the ocean’s surface.

Burnout, on the other hand, has been defined by experts as situational exhaustion and helplessness that’s usually specific to our job or burdensome task. We’re asked to do work that’s beyond our capacity to get it done. It’s not defined as a psychiatric “illness” per se like depression and usually demands a different kind of healing approach.

But what if we aren’t “technically” depressed, at least not in a clinical sense, or burned out? What if the real spur in our saddle is that we’re just unhappy in our lives as lawyers? We may find ourselves yearning for a greater sense of fulfillment and happiness in our daily lives, but it all seems so illusive. As a result, we keep doing what we already know how to do: put the old nose to the grindstone, try to just survive the blowtorch-like stress and drama and, hopefully, find some semblance of happiness.

Tal Ben-Shahar, Ph.D., a Harvard professor and author of the book “Happier,” says that how we go about searching for happiness is an important part of finding it. He identifies four archetypes – or patterns of behaviors and attitudes – with which we pursue happiness. One of the patterns he identifies is the “Rat Race Archetype.” This pattern of behaviors and attitudes “. . .sacrifices present enjoyment in order to be happy in the future.”

As applied to law students, lawyers and judges, we do well in law school to get that well paying job that requires an eighty-hour work week. We’re supposed to be happy because that’s why we sacrificed so much of our time and energy to get to where we are or want to be. But more often, we find that “the sense of fulfillment disappears, though the drudgery remains,” says Ben-Shehar.

Paradoxically, outsiders may regard the rat-racer as a paragon of success. “Others may even see him/her as a role model for younger children, suggests Ben-Shehar:

“’See, if you work hard, you can be successful like [Bob] too.’” But Bob actually pities these children, but cannot imagine what alternatives there are to the rat race. He does not even know what to tell his children: Not to work hard in school? Not to get good grades? Not to get a good job? Is being successful synonymous with being miserable? Being a hard worker is not the same as being a rat racer; there are supremely happy people who work long hours and dedicate themselves to their schoolwork or to their profession. What differentiates rat racers is their inability to enjoy what they are doing – and their persistent belief that once they reach a certain destination, they will be happy.”

There’s no easy remedy to counter the rat race archetype in the legal profession. Yet, I feel that offering some insight into the problem can lead us to think differently about our predicament. After all, insight is one of the major goals of all psychotherapy. Such insight may even result in our making small or large changes in how we structure our daily law practice. We need to reassess the motivation that is running our lives; the “why” of what we do and not so much the “what.” Lawyers complain about what they have to put up with: the demanding clients, impatient judges, opposing counsel who (we swear!) has it in for us or the Himalayan-like stack of papers on our desk. Yet, we don’t often ask ourselves where this “putting up with” approach is leading to.

Our society rewards doers, especially in the legal profession.

“We learn to focus on the next goal,” say Ben-Shahar, “rather than our present experience and chase the ever-elusive future our entire lives. We are not rewarded for enjoying the journey itself but for the successful completion of a journey. Society rewards results, not processes; arrivals, not journeys. Once we have arrived at our destination, once we attain our goal, we mistake the relief that we feel for happiness. The weightier the burden we carried on our journey, the more powerful and pleasant is our experience of relief. When we mistake these moments of relief for happiness, we reinforce the illusion that simply reaching goals will make us happy. While there is value in relief – it is a pleasant experience and it is real – it should not be mistaken for happiness.”

If our legal life is a series of moments of relief, we will not experience much happiness. I had to learn this one the hard way. I needed to reassess: why was I doing what I was doing? When I was honest with myself, I found that I saw completing my work as, primarily, a source of relief. I had become a very good lawyer, but much of my motivation was spurred on by this motivation; of flopping onto the sofa at the end of the day and thinking, “Thank God that’s over.”

Happiness, in some sense, seemed unrealistic to me before. I now believe that thinking of happiness as unrealistic is a small box view in a big box world of possibilities. We can change our motivation from one of chasing cheese to one of seeing that life happens in the present moment and not some future success. Our life is really a series of moments, isn’t it? And if we bet the house on the American anthem of “no pain, no gain” to obtain some future level of success, we may find that we end up not where we really, truly want to be.

Do Elders Have a Place in Helping Us Heal from Depression?

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Recently, an article about depression ran in the USA Today newspaper. In essence, it repeated the oft heard formula about how to treat depression: recognize the symptoms, visit and be evaluated by a psychiatrist (and go on medication if needed) and see a psychologist. I have lived out this trifecta of care and treatment and it certainly did help me recover from the worst aspects of depression. But, there was always something missing.

Two weeks ago, I decided to find and commit to a spiritual director in my life. This has taken the form of engaging a person to fill that role in my Catholic tradition. When I first met with my director, I said that I’d lived quite a bit up in my head as a lawyer. I didn’t want to read anymore books or facts about God. I was looking for a relationship with an elder who could teach me about deepening of my relationship to God.

In recent times, our society has called such a teacher-student pairing “mentoring.” Often, we think of it as an older person forming a relationship with a younger one centered on an activity such as school or sports. I believe that it can and should be more than that. And it certainly doesn’t have to take a religious form nor does it have to be an older person imparting his/her wisdom to a younger person. People can be our “elders” by virtue of their wisdom and/or special connection we share with them; indeed young people can be “old souls.”

I did a search today for depression and mentoring on my computer and all of the search results concerned adults helping out younger people to recognize and treat their depression. Yet, don’t we all wish that we had someone to guide us whatever our age? How many times have I heard veteran lawyers tell me that they sorely miss that parent, grandparent or special friend that was there to affirm them and to whom they could talk about the larger issues of life.

In contemporary society, psychologists (or more recently, “life coaches” or “executive coaches”) often fill the role of elders. My own psychologist (a true atheist whom I love and respect dearly), loved my idea of engaging an elder guide calling it “creative.” While depressive thinking does need to be confronted by healthier and more adaptive thinking, it may also require a larger dimension in which to examine and heal from it. Therapy can and does help us to “deal with”, “overcome” and “adapt to” depression. But for me at least, it doesn’t answer the larger questions of meaning. What meaning does this depression have in my life, if any? If it’s just the product of genetics, purely a disease, is there any meaning in it? If it’s just a psychological malady, why would I even bother – or feel the need – to address the spiritual dimension?

Think about it. Think about an organic experience with someone who may provide you with spiritual insight into your depression and help move you in a healthier direction. They can be like an old pine tree that you encounter during a long walk in the woods. How do we find such an elder? First, we have to be open to the idea and recognize that it could be of value to us. Once we have reached this place, we can begin to think creatively about who could fill that role. For me, it was a formal relationship with a spiritual director. Talk with your friends, spouse or psychologist about who could be a good fit for you. It’s true that when a student is ready, the teacher shows up.

Create space in your life for such a teacher and see who comes knocking on your door.

The Need for Community

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My psychologist said something remarkable months ago: “You’re a real loner Dan.” I really never thought about myself that way – and I’m 48 years old! But after reflecting on it awhile, I found what he’d said to be profoundly true. It didn’t mean that I didn’t have people in my life that I love and who love me. I have the best wife, a beautiful daughter and great friends. Yet, I often didn’t see just often I isolated myself by choosing solitary activities. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. It’s a question of balance. For me, the scales are tipping in the direction of reaching out and enjoying the fruits that only happen when really sharing with others.

And it’s not just lawyers that feel lonely. In a recent edition of the national publication for judges, Judicature, it was estimated that 70% of judges feel lonely. While there haven’t been any depression studies on judges, as there have been for law students and lawyers, one can only imagine their high depression levels.

I know that when I went through the worst of my depression, it was a very lonely experience. Not because people didn’t try to be there for me and help. Rather, it was because depression short circuits something in our brains that makes us essentially human: our capacity to engage with and feel connected to people. I’ve often said that being a lawyer can be a lonely job and believe that most lawyers, at least in their private thoughts, feel this way. When this loneliness in our jobs is compounded by the isolation we feel during a depression, it has a crushing effect. Oxygen disappears from the room only to be replaced by the vapor of melancholy. It feels like there is no escape and we are pounded into submission; a submission that on one level makes no sense because we are still carrying on with our lives – but just barely.

Lately, I’ve felt the desire to end my isolation. I have begun to recognize that what is most important in life, really, is family, friendship and community. It may sound trite and simplistic to offer this up, but such a simple truth has long eluded me in my life. My best friend, my wife, has seen me reach out to her more and it has only deepened our marriage. How many of us who have dealt with depression don’t reach out to the most precious person that we live with everyday? For some of you, it may not be your spouse. It could be anyone that you feel close to. If you don’t have someone like this in your life, it’s critical to develop one because a hour of therapy per week and a trip to the psychiatrist once a month simply is not enough support, love and encouragement to recover from and stay out of depression.

Think hard about your life. How much time do you spend with friends that you really connect with? What is your relationship life with your spouse and children? As lawyers, we often think and say, “Time is money.” However, the span of our lives is short and none of us is guaranteed even another day on this earth. If you are spending all of your time at the office and neglecting your need to connect with others, the cost is simply too high.

Leaving Behind a Life that Doesn’t Work

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Psychologist, James Hollis, describes depression as a “swampland”; a place that’s murky and dark where we’d rather not go. He doesn’t underestimate the power of the physical dimension of depression; the chronic fatigue, difficulty concentrating and disrupted sleep. Nor does he dismiss the notion that depression, for some people, has a genetic basis. But what he suggests, which is different than your standard psychological tome on the topic, is that depression can be the result of our psyche, or “true self” if you will, trying to assert itself. We are depressed, he opines, because we are essentially living a life we don’t want and didn’t consciously choose. We are living out a script created for us by our parents and societal expectations to be successful, accomplished and respected in a way that’s not in accord with our real needs and desires.

At some, the psyche protests; it tells the guys upstairs running the ego’s show, “We’ve had enough! We’re staging a work stoppage!” And so the psyche withdraws large amounts of energy from the false life we’ve been trying to construct and live out of. We try harder during a depression to compensate by swimming even harder in the habits we know best: exerting more effort, distractions or maybe even addictions. But, the psyche won’t budge. It wants to take us in another direction; it wants us to pay attention to our own inner compass and turn in that direction. In doing so we are enlivened and a depression may lift – – maybe. It seems like the true self doesn’t give a damn about all of our “career objectives” and false gods. That’s not its objective and it demands to be heard.

In my own life, this most certainly played out in my decision to become a lawyer. As I have previously written, my dad was an unrepentant alcoholic who abused me, my siblings and my Mom. Yet, early in his life, he was a hero in many regards: captain of his football team, a sailor in the Pacific theater during WWII and a graduate of the University at Denver. But somewhere along the way, as he aged and had more children, the wheels fell off. This would have large ramifications in my own life.

I became the hero of my family in a way that my dad never managed to achieve in his adult life. I played sports, was a “good kid”, earned great grades in college, and went to law school. Like many people who do well in undergraduate school, I didn’t know what to do with my marshmallow degree in psychology. So, true hero that I was, I went to law school. I must admit that I didn’t like it very much even though I did well. Its emphasis on rules and analysis, too often to the exclusion of the human journey, sometimes bored me silly. I would often wander off to the undergraduate library and read great works of literature while my orphaned law books sat at the edge of my desk. “Pick me up,” they pleaded. I turned a deaf ear and went back to my novel.

One evening, towards the end of my first year, I went to dinner with my Mom and older brother. I began pouring my heart out to her that I wasn’t happy in law school.

My mom listened half-heartedly. Her eyes began looking around the restaurant to avoid my gaze. “Have they changed the wallpaper in here,” she managed in a sing-song voice. I persisted: “Mom, I really need your help. I need you to hear me.” My brother, who had been sitting quietly next to me, got annoyed: “Stop, bothering mom; you’re upsetting her!” So I stopped. I learned that whatever I was planning to do about law school, dropping out wasn’t an alternative. As the hero, being lost – or worse yet, a failure – was simply unacceptable. I never listened to what my psyche was trying to tell me. That choice would come back to bite me later in life as one of the causes of my depression.

I can now see the unrealistic expectations that my parents unintentionally laid on me. Somehow a “successful” son would make up for all the brokenness in their own lives. It would somehow redeem the pain that our home had harbored for so long.

Now, after years of struggle, I realize I have choices. I don’t have to unconsciously live out my parents unlived lives. I can forgive them and move on. I now choose to be a lawyer, but on my own terms. With that comes responsibility. No one is going to make healthy choices for me. My depression certainly caused a “work stoppage in my life.” It isn’t something I would have ever consciously have chosen – who would have? But I used the experience to go back to the drawing board of my life to figure out what I really wanted out of life. I didn’t want to continue to be stuck in the muck of depression so I had to change. I had to build a life that worked for me.

And that’s still a work in progress . . . .

Is There Any Room For Kindness in the Law?

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Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote, “When I was young, I used to admire intelligent people; as I grow older, I admire kind people.” Kindness is an element that’s often missing in the practice of law. Perhaps the absence of this most human of qualities is why lawyers are so unhappy and unfulfilled. Likewise, kindness is often lacking during a depression. During such times, others may not be kind to us. Whether it’s out of ignorance or simply not caring, it hurts. Moreover, there’s the lack of kindness towards our selves during a depression. During such times, we use most of our energy grappling with the darkness just trying to find our way home. Kindness towards our selves seems unobtainable if not inconceivable.

When we get our bearings and depression lifts, it might be helpful to turn our ship towards kindness as an important quality to nurture in our work lives. Some of my more cynical brethren think I’m smoking weed when I talk like this. They opine: “You’d get crushed if you acted kindly. Don’t be a fool.” But, I’m not some idealistic dreamer, I’m actually a realist. Having been in the litigation trenches for over 20 years, I know all too well the brutality, hand-to-hand combat, scheming and grenades that are lobbed back and forth into our bunkers. I think I’m a realist because I’m well acquainted with and see the tremendous cost of it all. These experiences were, most certainly, a cause of my depression as it is for many lawyers.

Since I don’t want to return to my former melancholic state, I have thought about the cost of not incorporating kindness into my day – yes, even during my workday. It can be done in small ways, such as becoming aware of our tone of voice when we speak to our secretary, seeing our client’s phone inquires not as annoyances to endure but as opportunities to be of service or bringing a cup of coffee to the receptionist.

Kindness is intricately connected to the heart, more than the mind. We can’t crunch the numbers or do a cost-benefit analysis about this sort of thing. We have to simply take chances. In my own experience, the following Zen adage holds true: “Just leap and the net will suddenly appear.”

I believe that the fatigue most lawyers complain of is often connected to the lack of kindness. Kindness has an enlivening and authentic dimension to it. Harold Whitman once wrote, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.”

Poet, David Whyte, who I’ve written about before, speaks to such corporate titans as IBM, Mobil Oil and Citibank about meaning and beauty. In one moving passage of his book, “Crossing the Unknown Sea, he talks about his friendship with a pretty hip monk named Brother David Steindl Rast who happens to be a psychiatrist. Here is an excerpt of their dialogue:

“’Brother David?’” I uttered it in such an old, petitionary, Catholic way that I almost thought he was going to say, “Yes, my son?” But, he did not; he turned his face toward me, following the spontaneous note of desperate sincerity, and simply waited.

‘Tell me about exhaustion,’ I said. He looked at me with an acute, searching, compassionate ferocity for the briefest of moments, as if trying to sum up the entirety of the situation and without missing a beat, as if he had been waiting all along, to say a life-changing thing to me. He said, in the form both of a question and an assertion:

‘You know that the antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest?’ ‘The antidote to exhaustion is not necessarily rest,’ I repeated woodenly, as if I might exhaust myself completely before I reached the end of the sentence. ‘What is it, then?’

‘The antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness.’ He looked at me for a wholehearted moment, as if I should fill in the blanks. But I was blank to be filled at the moment, and though I knew something pivotal had been said, I had not the wherewithal to say anything in reply. So he carried on:

‘You are tired through and through because a good half of what you do here in this organization has nothing to do with your true powers’.”

Perhaps it’s tough to bring kindness, or wholeheartedness if you will, into our lives until we listen to our deeper human needs, both our own and others. That deep need which tells us that we are more than our jobs that we convinced ourselves we can’t change or leave. We must discover our “true powers” and part of that journey is reconnecting with this most fundamental of human yearnings – the desire for simple kindness.

One Lawyer at Midlife

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A few weeks ago, I attended my 30^th High School Reunion at a local watering hole. As my wife and I drove to the event, I felt the wind of the seventies blowing through my now thinning hair. Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “Taking Care of Business” blared out of my speakers; a feel good anthem of my generation. The song felt like a buoy that I had long ago sailed past only to return to now.

Walking into the tavern was like stepping through a time portal to a different time and place; its strangeness exaggerated by the dim light and pop of Bud Light’s being pried open. Above is a photo of me at the reunion with our Valedictorian. The thinning hair alluded to above is self-evident.

As I walked around the room, I sensed that my interactions with everyone would be cursory:

“Hi — How are you? — Married? — Divorced – Oh, I understand — Kids?– What you doing now?”

The changes in our bodies and faces bespoke the eternal passage of time; each of us entering the Fall of our lives.

Midlife, and all the challenges this stage of life brings, has been on my mind. You know, the sort of thing that wakes you up at 3 a.m. In a few weeks I’ll turn 48 and have been out of law school for 21 years. Besides the reunion, one other thing supplied the voltage for this middle age meditation.

I’ve been reading a book by Robert A. Johnson called, “Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the Second Half of Life.” He points out that the first half of our lives is spent addressing matters in the outside world – learning a trade, marrying and raising children and finding our way in this difficult world. Then, “in the second half of life, the hunger of our missing pieces often becomes acute. It dawns on us that time is running out. So we often set about rearranging things on the outside. Such changes distract us for a time, but what is really called for is a change of consciousness.”

There is something inside of all of us which has been unlived. This is part of the maturation process and just plain growing up. We choose this; we don’t choose that. As we age, our lives take on certain defining features that we never could have foretold in young adulthood. As I mingled at my reunion with people from so long ago, I imagined what unlived lives they each had. We all smiled and made small talk as we swayed to the music. All the while, I imagined their hopes to live their unlived lives gently humming beneath the surface.

Johnson further extrapolates on the unlived life:

“We must work very hard, until exhaustion, just to get ego awareness working well in contemporary life. It takes the whole educational system and all of our socialization processes to promote this consciousness, and our entire society is highly invested in this struggle. However, in the process of becoming differentiated adults, we inevitably become split. We all have both a lived and an unlived life. Most psychotherapies are designed to patch up wounded people and then throw them back into the battle of oppositions. They guide people in how to become better adapted socially: more adept at making money, more highly disciplined, more dutiful, more economically productive. Even when such therapy is successful and gets an individual back out into the rat race again, you can watch them wither over time under the weight of it all.

In the second half of life we are called to live everything that we truly are, to achieve greater wholeness. We initially respond to the call for change by rearranging outer circumstances, though our split is actually an inner problem. The transition from morning to afternoon that occurs at midlife calls for a revaluation of earlier values. During the first half of life we are so busy building up the structure of the personality that we forget that its footings are in shifting sands.”

Many, many lawyers are exhausted by the weight of their lives at the midpoint of their journey. It seems that their careers, and all the obligations that go along with it, have built a momentum that is seemingly unstoppable. So, they settle for distractions (entertainment, money, good food, etc.) along the road to retirement to blunt the pain. This pain is the pain of the unlived life; the part of their inner lives they didn’t get to live while committing large chunks of their time to building their careers.

We must turn and face ourselves at midlife. We must stop running and finally listen to that inner voice which is trying, desperately, to get us to listen; perhaps for the first time in a long time. It dawns on us that we are not the immortals we fancied ourselves in our youths to be. We recognize and sense our mortality and we have yearnings. We want to start living a life, instead of enduring one. Or, as Bruce Springsteen once said, “At some point, you have to stop thinking about the person you want to be and be that person.”

And maybe that’s what depression is about for some of us: painful symptoms that leak out because of un-reconciled parts of us demanding to be heard and lived. If the central concern of the first half of our lives is building up our resumes of success, maybe the second half of life is a deeper search for meaning and purpose. For me, the unlived life has recently found expression as a writer. I feel meaning in writing about things flowing through the deeper currents of life; in sharing my insights, musings and struggles with you.

Words of Wisdom

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For those of you who are regular readers of this blog, you know how much I love quotes. I look for them everywhere. To me, they’re like finding a little jewel on the sidewalk. I put it in my pocket, walk away and delight in it later. The best of quotes seem to capture something about their author that you don’t get from reading one of their books. Not necessarily better, but qualitatively different. Sort of like the difference between a movie and a photograph. They draw different things out of us.

Here are some good ones I’ve recently come across for your enrichment:

Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are your own fears.

-Rudyard Kipling

Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can read.

-Mark Twain

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

-C.S. Lewis

The time is always right to do what is right.

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

To laugh often and much; to know the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden path or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

All that is gold does not glitter; not all those that wander are lost.

-J.R.R. Tolkien

Now I’m off to a barbecue! Enjoy the beautiful summer weather.

Spiritual Hope – A Postscript

I have been listening to a wonderful audio interview with author/educator, Parker Palmer produced by a company called, Sounds True. Check out their website. Its catalog of authors address wellness, meditation, spirituality and personal growth is simply amazing.

Parker is currently 70 years old and a Quaker. In the interview, he recounts the three major episodes of clinical depression he went through during his life. He said some insightful things to say about those experiences. He doesn’t believe in “formulas” or “How-to-Lists” to cope with depression. He speaks about depression in the context of his spirituality:

“Perhaps, the answer is that my ravaged mind rails against even the idea of God, but something deeper in me calls out as if God might answer. ‘There are no foxholes,’ I guess, and depression is the deepest and deadliest foxhole I’ve been in. It may be the ‘dark night of the soul’ that the mystics talk about but in depression it is not so much that one becomes lost in the dark as that one becomes the dark. I have never been able to ‘do theology’ when I am in this state; the best I’ve been able to do is hang on. Only later, in the light of day, am I able to understand that God walked with me in the darkness even though I could not feel God’s presence at the time.”

Later, he talks about how he survived his depression: he “slogged through it.” And maybe, sometimes, that’s all we can do. While we may feel that a depression will never end, it’s important to remember that it always does and we can use that knowledge to slog through it.

The Ladder of Success

Many lawyers are consumed with the goal of becoming successful. Often, traditional success means money, status and power. According to veteran lawyer George W. Kaufman, author of the book, The Lawyers’ Guide to Balancing Life and Work, “For too many lawyers, the goal of success becomes the primary driver. But surveys of working lawyers tell us that a great many of them are unhappy even when their planned goals are realized . . .” This view was echoed by therapist, Alden Cass in an article on burnout in New York Magazine titled, Can’t Get No Satisfaction. Cass, who treats Wall Street lawyers in New York City, says, “I can’t tell you how many people come into my office and ask, “How come I have this money and I can’t find happiness?”

Most lawyers are never taught about the problems and pitfalls of pursuing success without also combining it with the pursuit of meaning and purpose. My parent’s only imperatives were that I go to college, get a good job and “be happy.” I worked long hours, endured constant stress and moved up my old firm’s pecking order. But somewhere along the way, I realized that something was terribly wrong with my life. I wasn’t just unhappy; I was full of sorrow. The great mythologist, professor and author, Joseph Campbell captured the irony of our common struggle for success: “You climb the ladder of success and when you get to the top you find it’s leaning against the wrong wall.”

I fell off that ladder and into a well of depression.

I was never taught how to navigate the waters of difficult emotions. When I looked around at my fellow lawyers, they all seemed so together — like a show room car that never got dented and was always polished.

Through my depression, I learned a lot about the darkness. That it isn’t exactly an illness, but part of the human journey for all of us. Educator and author, Parker Palmer, who went through and struggled with depression, wrote:

“Many young people today journey in the dark, as the young always have, and we elders do them a disservice when we withhold the shadowy parts of our lives. When I was young, there were very few elders willing to talk about the darkness; most of them pretended that success was all they had ever known. As the darkness began to descend on me in my early twenties, I thought I had developed a unique and terminal case of failure. I did not realize that I had merely embarked on a journey toward joining the human race”. Listen to a great podcast where Parker is interviewed for a show called, The Soul of Depression.

So much of the literature out there about success focuses on “work-life” balance. The formula in many of these tomes is the same: set limits, exercise and make time for family. All of these are well and good, but seem to so often fail us. There’s simply not enough gravity in them to keep us in orbit. What’s lacking is a basic truth: Life is made up of struggles and losses and how we deal with them. Such struggles can reach a crisis pitch in which we enter a sort of darkness.

In his book, Dark Night of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way through Life’s Ordeals, psychologist, Thomas Moore says:

“A dark night may not feel like depression. In a long illness or a troubled marriage you may be anxious, but not depressed. On the other hand, a clinical depression might well qualify as a dark night. Whatever you call it, the experience involves you as a person, someone with a history, a temperament, memories, emotions, and ideas. Depression is a label and a syndrome, while the dark night is a meaningful event. Depression is a psychological sickness; a dark night is a spiritual trial.

Many people think that the point of life is to solve their problems and be happy. But happiness is usually a fleeting sensation, and you never get rid of the problems. Your purpose in life may be to become more who you are and more engaged with the people and the life around you, to really live your life. That may sound obvious, yet many people spend their time avoiding life. They are afraid to let it flow through them, and so their vitality gets channeled into ambitions, addictions, and preoccupations that don’t give them anything worth having. A dark night may appear, paradoxically, as a way to return to the living. It pares life down to its essentials and helps you to get a new start”.

And maybe that’s what we all need – a new start. To wake up to a new vision about what success really means to us and how we need to act in our lives as lawyers to meet that meaning.

I remember the words of Mother Teresa on the topic of success. It’s worth mentioning that a book published in 2007, Come Be My Light – The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta, says that Mother Teresa felt deep sorrow, despair and one could argue “depression” for the last fifty years of her life. Yet, in the most profound sense –whether you are religious or not — wasn’t she a success? She once said, “We are not called to be successful. We are called to be faithful.” In other words, we can’t control the outcomes. But, we can live a life that is directed by our spirits. And THAT is a life of success.

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