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“Time” Management

Graduates of law school shouldn’t be given diplomas – they should be handed crash helmets. Our lives as lawyers can be bruising indeed. It’s not only the emotional charge of situations that we are asked to face; it’s the sheer volume of them. We are always running – running to beat time. The humorist Will Rogers captured the irony of this approach to time when he wrote: “Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with time we have rushed through life trying to save.”

As a profession, we are obsessed with the slicing, dicing and crunching of the seconds, minutes and hours were allotted in this life. In a recent search on Amazon, I found 26,864 books on time management alone. Yes, it is true that our working moments as lawyers have a monetary dimension. That’s just a fact of the profession. But for us to have fulfilling lives, time must mean more than that.

We have impoverished ourselves by seeing time only as a commodity to be used and profited from. There is a deep sadness in many lawyers over the use and quality of their time. They resent that their jobs take too much of their time, that they can’t spend more of it with their families and things they enjoy doing. One survey asked lawyers to, “List the most significant fears you have about your practice as a lawyer. Sixty-four percent said they fear spending too much time practicing law and not enough time living.

Too often there is a mindless, driven quality to our lives. Such a way of being is nothing short of deadening. The great psychologist, Rollo May put it succinctly when he wrote:

“The more a person is able to direct his life consciously, the more he can use time for constructive benefits. The more, however, he is conformist, unfree, undifferentiated, the more, that is, he works not by choice but by compulsion, the more he is then the object of quantitative time. . . . The less alive a person is – “alive” here defined as having conscious direction of his life – the more is time for him the time of the clock. The more alive he is, the more he lives by qualitative time.”

Try this day not to work so compulsively – to chase time. Value it not just as a day of work to be endured, but for the qualitiy of the moments that you have been given to live. Be humble and mindful of the love you bring to your work and how you use it. As Mother Teresa once said, “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”

Father’s Day By the Sea

It’s Sunday night, still Father’s Day. I’m on vacation with my family in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. The ocean’s waves are right outside my window reminding me of mysteries that I’ll never understand. And I am thinking of the man who was my father all those years ago.

My earliest memories of my dad are deeply troubling. His life was defined by violence, alcoholism and neglect of his family. I know that sounds morbid, even to me. But, it’s just the plain truth.

When I look back on his life this day, I think about the time that he was dying in the hospital for a month. One night, I stopped by after everyone else had gone. Only the florescent light from the hallway made sense of the room. My dad was tired and I told him just to sleep. I pulled up a chair beside his bed. My back was turned towards him and I was hunched over in the silence. I thought he was asleep. Minutes passed.

Then I felt his warm hand on my back. He was rubbing it as he never had before. We both said nothing. Yet, there’s no doubt what it all meant in that moment. He was saying that he was sorry and that he loved me. He couldn’t say those words no more than he could say at AA meetings, “My name is Walter and I’m an alcoholic.”

I asked my sister and three brothers about their memories of Dad dying. My one brother, Tony, said, “Danny, I know that you’re trying to find good in Dad. But really, he was just a big asshole.” Yet, I’m not so sure that’s what I was trying to do; to find “good” in him. What felt truer to me was the mystery of grief. Such an experience seems a strange mix of sadness, loss and the weight of existence. It’s a mystery that I can still touch today – especially today – when I think of him.

My sense of this is captured in Mary Oliver’s poem, “The Visitor.”

My father, for example,
who was young once
and blue-eyed,
returns
on the darkest of nights
to the porch and knocks
wildly at the door,
and if I answer
I must be prepared
for his waxy face,
for his lower lip
swollen with bitterness.
And so, for a long time,
I did not answer,
but slept fitfully
between his hours of rapping.

But finally there came the night
when I rose out of my sheets
and stumbled down the hall.
The door fell open
and I knew I was saved
and could bear him,
pathetic and hallow,
with even the least of his dreams
frozen inside him,
and the meanness gone.
And I greeted him and asked him
into the house,
and lit the lamp,
and looked into his blank eyes
in which at last
I saw what a child must love,
I saw what love might have done
had we loved in time.

A Litany of Quotes

I simply love quotes. I am always writing them down on scraps of paper. Winston Churchill once said, “It is a good thing to read books of quotations. The qualities, when engraved upon the memory, give you good thoughts.” Churchill needed such reminders because he suffered from depression, or what he called “the black dog,” much of his life. I often turn to quotes to lift my spirits or give me some insight into life’s deepest questions. While reading the newspaper this sunny morning, I came across a great quote from the novelist, Joyce Carol Oates:

“Nothing is accidental in the universe – this is one of my Laws of Physics – except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.”

Here are some other gems:

“Let us endeavor to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”

-Mark Twain

“We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.”

-Martin Luther King

“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

-George Eliot

“I find that the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against – but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie in anchor.”

-Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes

“The future depends on what we do in the present.”

-Mahatma Gandhi

My favorite collection of quotes is found in a book, Sunbeams: A Book of Quotations. The quotes found in this book were culled from the magazine, The Sun Magazine. If you’re not aware of this publication, you should be. It is simply a beautiful, eccentric and insightful magazine. What is the magazine about? Here is what the publisher says: “The Sun is an independent, ad-free monthly magazine that for more than thirty years has used words and photographs to invoke the splendor and heartache of being human. The Sun celebrates life, but not in a way that ignores it’s complexity. The personal essays, short stories, interviews, poetry, and photographs that appear in its pages explore the challenges we face and the moments we rise to meet them.” The last page of each edition, called “Sunbeams” is devoted to quotes. Check it out.

Do you have some favorite quotes? Please post a comment and share it with everyone.

In Praise of Kindness

This week, I was privileged to receive the Special Service Award from the Erie County Bar Association for my work in assisting lawyers with depression. It was a particularly emotional night for me. You see, my 81 year old mother was in the audience. She’s in very poor health and it was difficult for her to walk to our table at the event. My father died 30 years ago. So mom has been my only parent since I was 18 years old.

Each of the award recipients were asked to keep there remarks short. Accordingly, I will try to keep this blog short. I thanked the bar and many others for their love and support. First and foremost, my wife, Kelsey. No man could ask for a more beautiful and loving partner. Then I said:

“Last but not least, I want to thank my mother who is here tonight. She taught me one of life’s most important lessions: kindness counts.”

Rabbi Harold Kushner, author of the best selling book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, said that when he was a young man, he admired people who were cunning. But as he grew older and wiser, he admired people who were kind. See this great clip of him.

I told the audience the whopping statistics; about how major depression afflicts 350 billion people in our world. Forty million people in our own country suffer from it. It is the leading cause of disability worldwide and costs the U.S. economy 70 billion dollars a year in lost productivity.

But, as Helen Keller once said, “Life is full of suffering, but it’s also full of the overcoming of it.”

To me, being of service to others has helped me cope with my own depression. It has given me more than I have ever given. Giving to other appeals to what is best in people. To what Abraham Lincoln called, “the better angels of our nature.”

My role model for service is Mother Teresa. She used to carry around “business” cards that she handed out to people. On the front, was her contact information. On the back, read a beautiful prayer she had written.

The fruit of silence is PRAYER

The fruit of prayer is FAITH

The fruit of faith is LOVE

The fruit of service is love is SERVICE

The fruit of service is PEACE.

I wish all of you the peace that comes from loving service.

Lying in the Hands of God

Growing up in a Polish-Catholic home, I was more of a cultural catholic than a church going sort. But, my alcoholic father would make us go with him sometimes. I think it gave him a sense of normalacy; a feeling that he could be with other people without throwing down shots of Jack Daniels at a local watering hole. Only later did I develop any real sense of my own spiritual search. I’m still on that journey.

All religions have a lot to say on the topic of suffering, but not so much on the topic of depression. I guess you could say that depression is a “form” of suffering. Personally, I think that doesn’t cut it. When someone says to me, “Well, everyone suffers,” I walk away misunderstood and feeling the worse for the encounter. Maybe there’s not much dialogue about depression in our churches because of the raw fear that faith can’t fix everything.

When I first became sick, I didn’t know I had “depression”. I just thought I was having one of life’s many existential emergencies. I would kneel and pray that God would take away my pain. But, it simply didn’t happen that way. Sometimes, I would give God an ultimatum: “You either take away this damn pain, or I’m turning my back on you fella”. I demanded “a” solution, an answer. One wasn’t forthcoming.

As time went on, something happened. I stopped trying to dictate so many of the terms of my recovery from depression. Instead, I just began to surrender myself. I began to see that God was bigger than my depression. It didn’t mean that I wouldn’t suffer now or in the future from it. But a light appeared through cracks in depression’s armor. There’s a sense of joyous relief that comes when we stop the war against depression. We lay down our burden.

In the new album by The Dave Matthews Band, Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, there’s a beautiful song (listen now), called Lying in the Hands of God. In one part, Dave sings: “If you feel the angels in your head. Tears drop of Joy runs down your face. You will rise.”

At my best, when I feel “the angels in my head”, I weep with joy knowing that depression doesn’t have the final say in my life. Yes, there will be times when I suffer from it. But, it doesn’t last.

In her article written for my website, Sister Kathryn James Hermes (who suffers from depression), author of the book, A Contemplative Approach to Depression, wrote that prayer leads us to “. . . vulnerability – the learned powerlessness of the truly powerful who can simply be: simply wait, simply be present, simply wonder, simply trust that much larger hands are holding us and knows for whom we work in view of a much larger plan that we cannot as yet understand”.

Tune out the drumbeat of depression for a bit today. We don’t have to understand or control it all. Try lying in the hands of God awhile. And rise.

Managing Your Depressive Symptoms Is Not Enough

If you have been living with depression long enough, you will inevitably face the question of whether managing your depression is enough. Many lawyers dealing with depression (and there are 200,000 in America) are struggling to get rid of their symptoms of depression. I understand the value and necessity of this all too well. But once the symptoms seem manageable, what next?

In his book, What Happy People Know, psychologist, Dan Baker, offers his criticisms of much of modern day psychology: “Clinical psychology – the treatment in a clinical setting of people with mental disorders – was begun with great fanfare as an adjunct to modern medicine in the late 1800s. It was patterned after the conventional medical model of fighting pathology. Clinical psychology was based on the assumption that most people are mentally healthy – and happy- but some people contract mental pathologies that conform to neat diagnostic compartments, and require standardized treatments. The only problem is that it doesn’t work very well. It fails approximately two-thirds of the time.” As I write, let it be known that I attend therapy twice per month!

There is a great debate worldwide about the causes of depression. Most agree that it is a complex condition related to a combination of factors both genetic and environmental. While there is value in thinking about depression as a disease of sorts – say on par with diabetes or heart disease – there is a real danger to as well. That’s because it isn’t just a “disease;” it’s also a psychological and spiritual malady. If those aspects aren’t addressed, those who suffer from it may never taste the wonder and joy of life. They are left with the discontent of a life where they are only managing their depressive symptoms. Don’t we have the right to expect more?

Dr. Baker central point is that the approach of clinical psychology was not designed to help people find happiness. “It assumed that if mental illness were cured, happiness would naturally follow, as the normal human condition. But that doesn’t happen for the vast majority of people.” He continues, “I believe that even when people do not have diagnosable psychological illness, they still cannot be considered psychologically healthy unless they are happy. The absence of disease is not the same as health, just as the absence of poverty is not the same as wealth.” For a further exploration of the issue of happiness, see the interesting article in The Atlantic Magazine, “What Makes Us Happy” by Joshua Wolf Shenk. Interesting, Mr. Shenk is the author of Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness.

I believe Dr. Baker’s point is well taken. Yes, it is critically important to treat the symptoms of clinical depression. But we must stop and pause: is that enough? If it is, I can’t help but feel as though we have allowed ourselves to be victims on some level. Depression then has the danger of defining our identities as people. We are more than that. We must aspire to live a fuller life with times of joy, happiness and a sense of being alive. As Mark Twain once wrote, “Let us endeavor to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”

Warping Through Our Days

As a child, I would sit in the back seat of my parent’s old car with my dog, Sherman. As the car wound through the countryside where we lived, Sherman and I would stick our heads out the window during the summer as the wind whipped through our hair. There was such simple joy in this experience of speed, of motion. Of being carried through carefree space.

When we think of the speed of our lives as lawyers we cringe, don’t we? Our lives aren’t just lived in the fast lane, they’re lived at warp speed. At the periphery of our vision, we see only problems and other stressors. Any hope of joy gets sucked right out of our days like the grains of sand slipping through the narrow gap in a hour glass.

We hear so much talk of “time management”; of the next simple ten things we all need to get our lives together; to be a successful end product. Such talk has its place, but it seems that we never catch up with ourselves. We are warping onto the next thing on our “TO DO LIST”.

In his book, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity, poet and corporate trainer, David Whyte, uses the metaphor of a sea voyage to depict the journey through the world of work. He views work not only as a means of support, but as a means for interacting with the world and developing self-expression and identity. This is not a self-help book of step-by-step pragmatism, but rather how to forge one’s relationship with time and daily ritual. In one passage, he speaks about his friendship with Benedictine monk, Brother David Steindlrast. David is speaking to him about his stressed out life. Brother David tells him that the antidote to his exhaustion is not rest, but “wholeheartedness.” See this interesting clip on David giving a talk.

Put aside the appointment book for today. Turn off the ignition switch of your life for a bit. In his book, David notes that the poet Keats believed that truly great people have the ability to accept that not everything can be resolved, that they can thrive on uncertainty. As lawyers, it is so easy for us to emotionally shut down when faced with the grind of uncertainty. Maybe we have lived lives like this for years; we have closed our hearts to our own hearts. Yet, there may come a turning point in our lives when we are ready. When we are ready to listen to what the poet Keats called “the holiness of the hearts affections.” Part of David’s poem, The Opening of Eyes, reads:

“It is the opening of eyes long closed. It is the vision of far off things seen for the silence they hold. It is the heart after years of secret conversing speaking out loud in the clean air”.

Listen to that heart within you today. Let it speak out loud into the air of your day.

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