Dan's Blog Archives - Page 12 of 17 - Lawyers With Depression

The $tress of Success

We avatars of the legal system, we hired guns who ride into town and shoot up saloons, measure our success by the notches on our dusty belts: Did I win or lose? Or, perhaps more accurately, is it: Am I a winner or a loser? There is a thrill about winning and being successful, however we define it — but also a lot of stress.

Results, bottom-line bastards that they are, can spew toxic stress into our bodies like BP oil into the Gulf. Many lawyers struggle to shut off their inner dialogue that pings between their ears as they lay awake at night and their family sleeps: “Will I be successful tomorrow? Will I bill enough hours this month?” We mash ourselves up like Idaho potatoes flopping around in our beds as the minutes click away on our L.E.D. alarm clocks.

I wrote an article for Trial Magazine about the connection between stress, anxiety and depression. Here’s a part of that article:

“How our bodies and brains deal with stress and anxiety hasn’t changed much in the last 10,000 years. A wonderful defense mechanism, which is wired into our nervous system, is called the fight-or-flight response. When confronted with a threat – whether real or perceived – this response kicks in and floods our bodies with the powerful hormones cortisol and adrenaline, which propel us into action. This was an essential survival device for our ancestors who lived in the jungle and would have to flee beasts or fight foes trying to kill them.

Lawyers don’t face these types of real life-or-death threats. But they perceive life-or-death threats in their battles with opposing counsel while sitting in a deposition or sparring in the courtroom. Our bodies respond as if they were being chased by a hungry lion. Over time, this chronic anxiety causes the release of too many fight-or-flight hormones. Research has shown that prolonged release of cortisol damages areas of the brain that have been implicated in depression: the hippocampus (involved in learning and memory and the amydala (involved in how we perceive fear).”

Living in the jungle of our profession doesn’t involve warding off wooly mammoths, but it does involve a fight-or-flight from mental constructions in our heads: the fear of missing a court ordered deadline can create panic in our nervous system every bit as real as a tangling with a beast that tried to kill our ancestors.

Lawyers are perfectionists and overachievers who are never content to give things their just their best try. They believe in dumping large amounts of energy into each and every project. Such extraordinary efforts are stressful on our bodies and minds. Yet, we know all of this, don’t we? The truth is that many lawyers have already made the calculations in their heads and are willing to take the pounding for more dollars. We come back to our abodes at the end of our days exhausted, peak at our mutual funds statements and turn on the T.V. too tired to think about the implications of living this type of life.

Lawyer Steve Keeva, in his piece Take Care of Yourself, wrote:

“The dominant method of legal billing can, if you let it, subvert your ability ‘to claim a full and rich life for yourself,’ as litigator John McShane put it. Think about it. Billing by the hour is extraordinary in the way in which it so nakedly equates money with time. It thereby offers no incentive at all to stop working. The taskmaster par excellence can reduce grown professionals to slavish piece workers.”

When exploring the stress of success, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that depression happens in a context, a cultural milieu and a profession’s mores. Too often, we put everything on the individual – her depressive thinking, his genetic makeup – as if depression in a person forms and takes place in a vacuum: if it “takes a village to raise a child;” well, it takes a culture to create conditions for depression to develop.

We are social creatures that need support from our families, institutions and society. These structures help mitigate stress and prevent depression. Yet, contemporary culture has largely failed us: the breakdown in families, the betrayal of cultural and political institutions, a grimy cynicism in people, vacuous and crass entertainment unmitigated consumerism and a legal profession which endorses the value of professionalism while lawyers say that levels of incivility between lawyers is at an all time high. It’s become more of a business than a profession and calling, it’s become more mercenary in nature where lawyers forget that they are officers of the court and not just there to do the bidding of a well paying client.

Bruce Levine, Ph.D., author of the book Surviving America’s Depression Epidemic, writes about renowned psychoanalyst and social critic Eric Fromm’s commentary on the connection between our cultural values and depression. Here is an excerpt from book about the dangers of a comsumerism driven culture:

“Fromm argued that the increase in depression in modern industrial societies is connected to their economic systems. Financial success in modern in modern cultural societies is associated with heightened awareness of financial self-interest, resulting in greater self-absorption, which can increase the likelihood of depression; while a lack of financial interest in such an economic system results in deprivation and misery, which increases the likelihood for depression. Thus, escaping depression in such a system means regularly taking actions based on financial self-interest while at the same time not drowning in self-absorption – no easy balancing act.

The idea that money and buying stuff and acquiring status = happiness isn’t treated for what it is – a paper thin myth. Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with making money; buying things and wishing to obtain a certain level of success in our careers. It’s a healthy recognition of the limitations of our income and what it really can buy that makes all the difference and keeps us out of this downward spiral.

In the book The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want, author Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ph.D., concludes:

“One of the reasons for the failure of materialism to make us happier may be that even hen people finally attain their monetary goals; the achievement doesn’t translate into an increase into an increase in happiness. Also, materialism may distract people from relatively more meaningful and joyful aspects of their lives, such as nurturing their relationships with family and friends, enjoying the present, and contributing to their communities. Finally, materialistic people have been found to hold unrealistically high expectations of what material things can do for them. One father confided to me that he believed that purchasing a forty-tow-inch flat-panel TV would improve his relationship with his son. It didn’t.

A more spiritual take on the issue was penned by famed author and Trappist monk Thomas Merton. In his classic work, No Man Is an Island, he writes:

“One of the chief obstacles to a sense of wholeness in life is the selfish anxiety to get the most out of everything, to be a brilliant success in our own eyes and in the eyes of other men. We can only get rid of this anxiety by being content to miss something in almost everything we do. We cannot master everything, taste everything, understand everything, drains every experience to its last dregs. But if we have the courage to let almost everything else go, we will probably be able to retain the one thing necessary for us -whatever it may be. If we are too eager to have everything, we will almost certainly miss even the one thing we need.

Happiness consists in finding out precisely what the ‘one thing necessary’ may be, in our lives, and in gladly relinquishing all the rest. For then, by a divine paradox, we find that everything else is given us together with the one thing we needed.”

For Merton, that one thing was God. For some of us with depression, this may be our touchstone as well; a center around which to slow down the centrifugal force of our spinning lives. For the others, it may be our family or friends. But whatever it is, it must ground us and bring out, as Abraham Lincoln once said, “The better angels of our nature.”

To lessen the stress in your life, and the risk for developing or exacerbating your depression, try these tips from your friend Dan:

1. Fast for a few days from the radio in your car, the newspapers or fooling around on your Blackberry. Take a time out. Think of it as an experiment. Lawyers complain that they’re stressed out only to dump more information and stimulation into their craniums at every few moment they have. Lawyers already read and think enough for a living – give your nervous system a break for crying out loud.

2. Hand in hand with the above, incorporate some slice of silence into your life. It doesn’t have to be a monastic experience. I wear a runner’s watch and do a ten to fifteen minute period of silence a day. If you don’t do something like this, you know what you’re stuck with – too much noise.

3. Start asking yourself some questions. What toll on your mental and physical health is your drive to succeed exacting on your life? Make an actual list, take it out every day and read it. The purpose is to try to become more conscious of the actual cost of your career to you. People tell me they don’t have the time to do this, but then spend hours researching whether to buy a Lexus or Audi. The irony of it all.We love accumulating things and experiences in our society. Instead of adding something into your life, what can you drop out of it that would make you feel better?

4. Read something that would nurture you as a person and dump the rest of the crap. Read only one thing at a time. Maybe a book of poetry or the biography of a heroic person.

5. Reconnect with the humorous, whether highbrow or sophomoric. Plug into it and have a gut-busting hoot.

6. Remember, that life isn’t a dress rehearsal. The time you’re spending at your job is a segment of finite time that you’re given. Once it’s spent, it’s spent. No one tells you how to spend it, despite what you might have gotten yourself around to believing. Remember, you choose. My priest once said that on every gravestone there are two dates: the date we were born and the date we died. We don’t get to choose those dates. But between those dates, is a dash line: “—.” That dash is our life and what we have done with it. Resolve to be a person whose dash is driven by substance and not solely by success. As Mark Twain once wrote, “Let your life sing so that upon your death, even the undertaker will weep.”

7. The notion of “quality time” for oneself or others is largely bullshit. Richard O’Connor, Ph.D. once said that to overcome depression we need to start investing in ourselves like we’re worth it: exercising, sleeping enough, etc. No matter how you slice it, there is no small amount of “quality time” in which you can achieve these basic self-care routines. The reality is you will need to take whatever amount of time it takes because YOU are worth it.

8. If you are locked in the success matrix as a lawyer, remember that it doesn’t have to stay that way forever. Realistically, your life won’t probably change tomorrow. But it can begin to change in small way that can lead you in a healthier direction.

Three Skills for Overcoming Depression

“Courage is fear that has said its prayers.” Author, Regina Brett

The legal profession and those who shape it devote plenty of time to the practical side of being a lawyer; the nuts-and-bolts of how to do, for example, a Will and Estate. Precious little time, however, is spent on teaching lawyers how to maneuver skillfully through their lives not just as professionals, but as people.

Three years ago, when I first went public with my depression, I suggested to a Bar Association director that we put on a half-day Continuing Legal Education Seminar on Depression. She looked at me oddly — as if her face were about to crumble — and said “Who in the world is going to show up for that.” With some trepidation, I went forward expecting twenty people – over 125 showed up. Lawyers are hungry for meaning in their lives and want direction from other people in the business.

Ideally, every young lawyer should be paired with a mentor, a wise elder of the law. Lacking that, few lawyers have examples of how to deal with the profession in a healthy and meaningful manner. Is it any wonder then that lawyers suffer from depression at twice the rate of the average citizen?

We live in a profession where people endure a real pain, trauma and meaninglessness in the hope that it will get better “someday” in the indeterminate future. That someday may come sooner than later in the form of early retirement forced by burnout, unforeseen illness or some sort of divine intervention. I don’t see this as pessimistic, but as realistic. My goal is to wake lawyers up to the real costs of approaching their vocation with only nut-and-bolts in their tool chest. We are not crude machines in need of tune-ups. We are living beings in need of emotional and spiritual sustenance.

Depression is a type of half-living; we go to work, raise our children, sip lattes, do wheelies on our mountain bikes or grill steaks on the grill. But there is something vital within us always yearning just below the surface, something that seeks expression in our lives. Perhaps the situation wouldn’t be so dire for the legal profession if our time as lawyers were just okay – a manageable amount of stress, decent interactions with people and fair wages. But it isn’t okay; it’s completely out of balance: too much stress, combative interactions and wages, albeit much higher than the average American worker, that exacts a tremendous toll on our brains and bodies.

Is there any hope, any way out of this legal conundrum? I think there is because I have seen it happen in my own life, and in the lives of scores of other lawyers. For most – including me—the pain decibels have to be jacked up pretty high for us to conclude that change is better than living one’s life this way.

Carl Jung, a former protégé of Sigmund Freud, offers us a great deal of wisdom for dealing with our modern day psyche. He never preached a “top ten” ways to overcome depression, but some of his essential wisdom can be summarized for the modern reader. In dealing with melancholy, he said that there were three essential steps that we need to take – and no one else can take them for us.

In his book “Why Good People Do Bad Things,” James Hollis, a student of Jung, writes:

“To gain the positive values arising from the “landfill” we call the Shadow [i.e. to learn the painful lessons that depression is trying to teach us], we have to wrestle with Jung’s suggestion that to be a full , we have to know what we want, and do it. Knowing what we want, really, takes a lot of sorting. And living what we find, really, takes a lot of courage and endurance. In reflecting on the task of therapy, Jung once noted that it can only bring us insight. Then, he said, come the moral qualities of our character – courage to face what must be faced, and then to take the leap, and the endurance to stick it out until we arrive at the place intended for us from the beginning. So much of our lives have been lived through reflexive adaptations [unexamined emotional habits grounded in our past], so knowing what we really want is difficult, and then scary, but it feels right when we live it, as were meant to do.”

Here’s a great presentation by Dr. Hollis about finding a meaningful path in life.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCIOI71neL0]

Insight

Most of us are, at best, barely aware of things we do and why we do them. Many stuck in the muck of depression are doing things that actually encourage their distress without knowing they are doing so. As Richard O’Connor, Ph.D., points out, “Depressives keep doing the things they’ve always done because they don’t know how to do anything else.” They’ve become experts at “depressing.”

Insight means that we begin to see the causes of our distress and our role in perpetuating it. As Dr. O’Connor has said: “We aren’t to blame for depression, but we are responsible for getting better.” To fulfill that responsibility, we need to develop ideas of what and how to do things differently in our lives and we can only do that when we have some insight into why things are going so wrong. Absent this, we will continue to drift; to be a sort of unhappy ghost in the world.

We can become educated, in a dialogue with our therapist, about the origins of our depression and the old wounds that we will need to revisit in order to heal. It’s in the safety of a therapist’s office where we learn to stop blaming others and – perhaps a bigger problem for depressives – ourselves. Blaming ourselves is replaced by the recognition that bad things did happen to us as children that were not our fault. In fact, much of our negative thinking and painful emotions were learned and endured here. They don’t go away – we carry them into hood. Numerous studies have concluded that one of the major indicators for onset depression is trauma, neglect or abuse during childhood. Blaming others is replaced by the recognition that this just keeps us stuck and resentful.

We shouldn’t give ourselves license to remain stuck in our childhoods and abdicate our responsibility in the here and now to create a healthy life. Our responsibility is to find a way to empower ourselves so that we can get on with living a fulfilling –instead of futile—life.

Courage

Once we get insight, we need to then act on it. Jung suggests that this isn’t something a therapist can give you. It’s your job to leave that one hour session and go out into the world and experiment with your newly found knowledge. In short, you will need courage.

Too often, people achieve hard-fought insight, but then their recovery doesn’t go very far because they don’t put their wisdom into action. In my experience, action can be stressful because it involves stepping out of depression’s cave (a dark cave, yes, but also cozy in its own destructive sort of way) and risking new behaviors or feeling emotions long suppressed. We can even feel great shame – a sense of cowardice—if we don’t change because in some sense, we feel we now “know better.”

Pilot Amelia Earhart once wrote: “Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.” We are never at peace until we act in congruity with our inner truth.

I’ve have talked to hundreds of lawyers across the country who say that they “have to” stay a lawyer, as if it is a form of servitude that was somehow imposed on them. This seems to me a variation of depression’s theme that they are helpless. This is not to suggest and I’m unsympathetic or unrealistic about the very real impediments to change. What I am saying is that such impediments are given way too much power over our lives. They become heinous bogeymen that we’re afraid to confront. We give them so much power, that we remain stuck and depressed in our relationship to them. We think of our fears as “reality” and our dreams for a different life as flat-out .

The fact is it may not be your law job that is depressing; you may be bringing your depressive way of being into the job. It might be true that you’d be just as depressed if you were a librarian or sang in a country western band.

I am not suggesting any answers on this score. I am suggesting the living of questions to untangle this Gordian knot: Why am I choosing to remain in the job I am in? What behaviors support my depression while at work? Am I willing to take some chances, even small ones, to move my life in a different direction?

You will need courage, my friend, to act on the insights you’ve gained and not let these precious seeds die in the ground.

Sometimes music can get themes across when words aren’t enough. The other day, my ear inclined towards this powerful piece of bluesy jazz music by artist Lizz Wright. Watch this video of her belting out her song “You Can Fly”.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNWFlwOBhDE]

Endurance

Once we have got it together, it has to stay together. Episodic starts and stops just won’t do in the long run. We need to be determined for our recovery and personal growth to continue. We can get lazy or reckless about this. We just don’t want to put in the time to exercise, or think that it really doesn’t matter if we don’t go to therapy. It does my friend. I’ve learned the hard way. Everything counts.

We will all have peaks in valleys in this journey. The important part is not to stop. It took us a while to fall into depression, and it will take us a while to get out of it. By pressing on, we grow in stature because it is a courageous journey. Novelist William Faulkner once wrote: I believe that men and women will not merely endure. They will prevail. They are immortal, not because they alone among creatures have an inexhaustible voice, but because they have a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.”

My Friend’s Shot at Redemption

There’s a complexity to language; words color what we think, say and do. With our locutions, we praise and condemn, stumble upon transitory meanings and conniptions and try to make sense of things both ordinary and profound. What words we use to describe ourselves and others says a lot about the world we live in.

“I’m a loser, a failure,” my buddy said through sad eyes as he looked across at me.

Tom’s 50 years old and been struggling with anxiety and depression for the past fifteen years. I have witnessed the arc of his demise, his struggle to keep depression’s wolves at bay. There had been red flags along the way – a bad temper, divorce, drinking too much and a lot of self-condemnation. But my friend had long felt that these were justified by what the adversarial nature of the law had saddled him with. He didn’t see – until now – his role in creating the mess that his life was now in. Only pain, unrelenting pain, had broken him open. It had humbled him and given him the opportunity to honestly examine his life.

As my friend spoke on, it seemed to me that he wasn’t only seeking better mental health – that seemed to be unattainable for him during this low tide – but a sort of redemption; not in any great religious sense, though he certainly would’ve welcomed any help of the divine variety.

The redemption he was hoping for and seeking was a second chance at life. He wasn’t sure whether he deserved it; but he was hopeful that he would be given one. A second chance to make better choices in his life; to stop going down mental and emotional dead ends that only strengthened depression’s vise-like grip on his life. Ultimately, the restoration of a fundamental goodness and harmony that had been so long absent.

Tom’s brokenness seemed not just about his depression, but cracks in his soul. In his misguided efforts to squelch his bottoming-out, he often did self-destructive and self-defeating things – anything to soothe those acerbic rants of depression. But the rants inside his head didn’t stop – they only got louder.

Perhaps they were trying to tell him something, I suggested. “No they’re not”, his psychiatrist had assured him. “It’s just part of the disease of depression, pure and simple”. Yet I believe that such advice did more harm than good. No doubt Tom, given his incapacitated state, could probably benefit from some medication. But he could also benefit from trying to discern the signposts contained inside the depression that might lead him out of the swamplands.

Author Lee Stringer, in the book Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression, writes:

“One grows older and more knowing over time; life’s more facile charms grow dim; the soul yearns, seeking more than could ever be had on this earth, more than could ever be wrought out of three dimensions and five senses. We, all of us, suffer some from the limits of living within the flesh. Our walk through the world is never entirely without that pain. It lurks in the still, quiet hours which we, in our constant busyness, steadfastly avoid. And it has occurred to me since that perhaps what we call depression isn’t really a disorder at all but, like physical pain, an alarm of sorts, alerting us that something is undoubtedly wrong; that perhaps it is time to stop, take a time-out, take as long as it takes, and attend to the unfinished business of filling our souls.

The aridity of our soul calls out to be watered by a greater relationship to the Universe, called by many God. This Mystery is concerned not only with the building up of better mental health, but also our engagement with the larger questions of life: Why was I born? Who am I? What is my life’s purpose? What is the meaning of life? Why have these Job-like tragedies befallen me? The ancient Greek’s talked about Fate and Destiny, modern-day philosophy calls it existentialism. But, they’re all ultimately concerned with the same thing – a jettisoning of friviloius, superficial and hedonistic pursuits and the journeying towards wisdom and a wider vision of what this life is truly about.

In some sense, we can be worn out by such intense probing. But the questions won’t go away, as if demanding our response. When we give up engaging with these larger questions in life, we are inevitably diminished in some fundamental way. We “settle” for a more predictable and smaller life that we often regret later on – the roads not taken. But when we meet these questions, when we finally stop running away from life, we can begin to respond to our soul’s deepest yearnings.

Thomas Moore, in his best-selling book, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life, writes:

“The soul presents itself in a variety of colors, including all the shades of gray, blue, and black. To care for the soul, we must observe the full range of all its colorings, and resist the temptation to approve only of white, red, and orange – the brilliant colors. The “bright” idea of colorizing old black and white movies is consistent with our culture’s general rejection of the dark and the gray. In a society that is defended against the tragic sense of life, depression will appear as an enemy, an unredeemable malady; yet in such a society, devoted to light, depression, in compensation, will be unusually strong.”

Looking into my friend’s weary eyes, I don’t tell him he’s mentally ill or that he deserves his pain for all the bad mistakes he’s made – he’s already been told this by others. I don’t tell him to get help, because he already knows that and is getting help. I don’t even tell him that it’s terrible that he’s experiencing depression

What I do tell him is that something or someone essential –something beyond just recovering from depression – is missing from his life. I don’t pretend to know what or who that is; we each have a unique relationship with life. But I tell him that he will have to search for that essential thing or person – and it might not come easy. But it’s in living the big questions that we are somehow healed, perhaps slowly, and recover a sense of meaning to our lives which is, after all, what our souls truly want.

My friend needs a renewal, a change of course, another chance – a real shot at redemption.

Listening to Our Depression

Any dialogue about the warp and woof of depression should include something about its value in our lives. That sounds like a bugged out thing for me to say; all the more so when you consider that much of the national dialogue has been dominated by main stream medicine that tells us that depression is an illness – just like diabetes or heart disease. I have, in fact, been part of this choir at different times.

Leading this charge is psychiatrist, Peter Kramer. He’s the author the best-seller, Listening to Prozac and followed up recently with, Against Depression. His conclusion is that we need an all out war, a full fledged armada, against depression which he maintains is “brain damage” which we must stop from occurring in the first place or progressing once it has gotten a foot-hold.

I think Kramer’s arguments oversimplify the complex malady that is depression. More than just a biological illness, depression is also a dying of one’s soul. Indeed, one’s inner self – that which is most vital and true about us – is a casualty of depression.

What if by medicating our depression, or replacing its jagged thoughts with “clearer” or “more constructive thinking habits” (As defined by whom?), we are moved in the wrong direction? What if medication doesn’t so much result in full remission (i.e. the goal of psychiatry) of depression as a “draw” with the gun-slinging opponent that our melancholy can seem like?

What if we’re not supposed to mute our depression with medication or straighten out our uneven thoughts with a flat iron? What if we are killing the messenger?

In his book, The Swampland of the Soul, psychologist, James Hollis, sees depression less as a biological phenomenon, than as a psychological one. Here’s his description of its causes:

“Depression can feel like a well with no bottom, but is a well with a bottom, though we may have to dive very deeply to find it. Think of what the word means literally, to de-press, to press down. What is “pressed down”? Life’s energy, life’s intentionality, life’s teleology is pressed down, thwarted, denied, violated. While the etiology of such pressing down may or may not be discernible, something in us colludes with it. We might even say that the quantity and quality of the depression is a function of the quantity and quality of the life force which is being pressed down. Life is warring against life, and we are the unwilling host.”

What is pushing down our life force as attorneys with depression? Is it just the long hours, stress and adversarial nature of our craft? No doubt such factors play a role, just like our biology and genetics. But clearly much of the foundation of adult onset depression has been layered, brick by brick, in our childhood experiences for it is here where we learn how much to value ourselves and others. If we learn to value ourselves in a healthy way early on in life’s journey, there are fewer impediments in the future to de-press our life’s energy which is trying to express itself.

If we have grown up in a dysfunctional home, as the majority of adults with depression have, it will be much harder to feel good about ourselves and build a healthy life without depression. This is so because we have learned to devalue our inner experiences and give too much weight to what others expect and think about our life’s value and future course. After all, all parents are giants to small children. In a child’s world of magical thinking, there is no way of filtering out parents’ toxic messages about a child; no way of seeing these voices as a reflection of the parent and not a child’s fledging sense of identity.

This was certainly the case with me. My alcoholic father, who had gaping holes in his psyche and soul, couldn’t nurture himself let alone his five children. The eldest of five children himself in an era of WWII veterans, his feelings were alien to him. As time went by, he crumbled under the weight of his disease and growing awareness, on some level, that he was a failure at work and home. My mother, an equally damaged person who grew up with an alcoholic father, never learned the basic law of reciprocity in love and nurturance.

No wonder I ended up as a young man after a successful undergraduate career; without an internal sense of who I was or what I wanted to be. Like many others without a deep relationship to self and my feelings, I “chose” the law because of one thing I could be sure of – it was a chance to serve others, be a professional and make money. This is, to be sure, why many young people go into this strange business we call the legal profession.

I was estranged from something essential in me for many years, so powerful was the pushing down of my own inner instincts and life force. I felt defined and limited by who I had been in my rocky childhood, whether I was aware of it or not. I always felt a gnawing sense that something was missing – that piece turned out to be nothing less than my essential self.

Dr. Hollis frames the developmental task before us after we have come to sense this elemental truth:

“The task implicit in this particular swampland is to become conscious enough to discern the difference between what has happened to us in the past and who we are in the present. No one can move forward, psychologically, who cannot say, “I am not what happened to me: I am what I choose to become.” Such a person can come to recognize that the early deficit was not inherent in the child, but the result of circumstances beyond the child’s control. One can then begin to tap the energy for life that was previously walled off.”

And so begins the journey out of the well of depression for all of us. We must learn to regain our inner authority – regardless of our biology. This doesn’t mean one needs to quit the law – though some may need to do so to follow their true path. It may be a more modest shift in perspective or a reshuffling of our life’s deck.

Hollis has a great analogy that captures the value of modest changes. He writes that steering our lives is like a pilot using his navigation instruments while flying. A one degree shift here or there will determine where he ends up landing; in Africa or in Europe.

In Listening to Depression, psychologist, Lara Honos-Webb writes that depression is trying to tell us something: that we are on the wrong track in life. In this sense, depression can be a teacher if we would only listen to it. In one interview, she summarizes the five greatest gifts as follows:

– It propels you on a search for the meaning of life

– It’s nature way of pushing you out of your comfort zone. Depression reminds you that you are losing your life while not risking

– It’s a breakdown in the service of offering you an opportunity for a breakthrough

– It means it’s time to reclaim your power to author your own life

– It alerts you when you have gotten off course and guides you towards self-healing.

How do we come to see these truths? Honos-Webb says:

“Depression can be seen as a break-down in the service of offering the person an opportunity for a break-through. In this way, depression can be a corrective feedback to a life with little reflection. We only reflect on those things that break down in life. For example, if life is going along smoothly you won’t spend time thinking about the meaning of life. We tend to think deeply about life when something is not working. When we identify a problem, we begin to reflect on what caused the problem and how to fix the problem. If you are disconnected from your deepest feelings and impulses you may still manage to get through life without realizing it.”

I admit that it’s hard to see depression’s value when in the thick of it, the swamp through which we slog without relief. But there’s much to be said for seeing depression not just as a disease, but as a diminishment of self which makes our world too small. We don’t have to keep colluding in our own victimization. And remember this:

You are not what happened to you – You are what you choose to become.

Springing Out of Depression

Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems. – Rainer Maria Rilke.

Spring is a time of renewal. If we follow nature’s lead, it’s a time for rebirth. During the long nights of winter, depression can have a vise-like grip around our throats. The increasing sunlight and warmth seem to make this black dog recede back into the shadows.

Spring cleaning is a perennial happening in this country; people tossing out and cleaning up in every zip code imaginable. This feels good because it gets our bodies moving, we feel productive and somehow lighter. Depressives have a lot of dross in their drawers; layers of junk strewn haphazardly throughout the pockets of their days.

Today, I’m cleaning out that most sacrosanct of male domains – my garage. Laugh you may, but I really enjoy it. I love the productivity of it all, the manual labor that gets things done without relying on my ability to think and analyze problems. It seems to bring my life back into some sort of momentary harmony; a clarity where there used to be only the mildew of depression.

It puts me back in contact with nature, with the fresh air that blows and the ground where life is murmuring and waiting to come forth. Novelist Margaret Atwood writes, “In Spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.” I don’t know about you, but that’s my plan for the day.

Yes, Spring is a time of change; a transition from the hibernation of winter. It’s a good time to go back to the drawing boards of our lives and look at what is and isn’t working for us; what is and is not contributing to our depression. If something works, keep it; if not, chuck it.

Springtime is a great time not only to clean out garages, but also our minds that get gooey with too much depressive thinking. Too often, depressives are immobilized by . . . well, depression. Because they think that they can’t get anything done, they . . . get nothing done. That sort of thinking needs to be tossed to the curb along with the rest of the trash.

Depression seems to add 50 pounds of psychic weight to our bodies. We drag ourselves around the block like a broken wagon, never feeling that we have enough energy to do anything. Yet, it is profoundly true, that energy begets energy in this corner of the Universe; hence, my assault on the garage.

Depression is hard-headed and stupid. For some reason, this thought pops into my head as I watch my dog Sherman chewing on an old toy, slobber running down his brownish coat.

Depression can make you feel like that best thing for you to do is sit on the couch and watch Brady Bunch reruns while sucking down a Coke. But what’s really needed to make you feel better is movement.

That’s why I’ll be hanging out in my garage today. It’s such a simple thing to do. No game changer in the grand scheme of things. Just an ordinary thing, in an ordinary life, that makes me feel great.

Getting Things Done While Depressed

In my last blog, I wrote an article about the importance of goal setting for those in the legal profession with depression. I went looking for some nifty quotes on the topic; true nuggets of insightful wisdom. Instead, I found a lot of boorish material which just rehashed what we already know – it’s important to get your act together.

That being said, I hope to humbly offer up my own take on goal setting for those hampered by the drag of depression.

Depression is full of waffling and meandering through the wastelands of our somber thoughts. We are, of course, seduced into all of this by such thoughts — as if this were a productive way to live one’s life. The thoughts gather strength and become ingrained cognitive habits as we repeat them millions of times with several variations on the same theme: “I’m no good”, “nobody cares about me,” “I can’t do anything right” or what’s wrong with me?” Listen, thinking these thoughts occasionally are normal for anyone who has been smacked around by life’s trials and tribulations. After all, we are all jerks at different points of our lives . . . . . speak for yourself Dan, you may retort!

The problem comes in when such thoughts aren’t a sometime-sort-of-thing, but an all-the-time-sort-of-thing. They take up residence in our minds and make a mess of the kitchen.

Depressive thoughts become one of the reasons we avoid, forget and/or just can’t seem to set healthy goals. It’s as if in the midst of a depression, we simply don’t care because we can’t see anything good happening in the near or far future to us whatever we do. This self-talk is a script right out of the movie, “How Depression Took over My Life.” (Not a real movie)

There are two ways to approach this issue of goal setting for the depressed professional. Though they aren’t mutually exclusive, it’s helpful to pull them apart.

Goal Setting with Depression

There will be different things you’ll be able to realistically get done depending where you fall on the depression continuum. However, some ideas which should help everybody:

Structure Your Day – Please.

People with depression can feel scattered and overwhelmed. The strain of being so exacerbates their depression because of the stress chemicals released in their bodies. As such, go through your day first thing in the morning and decide how it might play out in your mind. Try to be constructive about it. Watch the language you use in your self-talk. Instead of your stated goal being, “Not to feel like crap today,” try something like, “Today, I’m going to do my best to take care of myself.” The shift in perspective can and does make a big difference.

Keep it simple.

I keep a stack of 3 x 5 index cards in my laptop case and use one per day. On it, I write 3-5 things on the left that are priorities and 3-5 things on the right that I’d like to get done. I used to have a variety of notes scattered across piles of legal pads. You can still do that if you, like me, are a “To do” list junky. But, try the index card approach. It’s cheap and simple to do. Keep it in your shirt pocket with a pen so you don’t have to search for it. Psychologists tell us it takes 21 days for a habit to stick so give it three weeks.

Goal Setting at Work

Managing and Delegating

You must corral your work. If you don’t, it’ll sink you when you’re dealing with depression. If you have a secretary, lean on her heavily to organize your day and your desk. Sit with her every morning and go over the day. Many lawyers are control freaks and aren’t good at delegating. You have to break that habit and let go of this compulsion.

Regrouping

Many lawyers bring their all-or-nothing cognitive approach to the workday. Either they have to get everything done (“Yikes!”) or nothing done (e.g. they blow the whole day because they don’t feel well at the beginning of the day). A good cognitive tool to use is regrouping. I would sometimes have a crappy morning and think that the day was then ruined. I’ve since learned to regroup at different intervals of the day, take stock and tell myself that just because the morning was crummy (or even the past hour) that doesn’t mean that I can’t zoom in the afternoon.

Watch Your Depression Patterns

Learn the patterns of your depression as they relate to your work day. If you pay attention, depression takes on a certain pattern. For me, I felt my worst in the morning. This was often related to trouble sleeping. I would begin zooming around 10 in the morning. As such, I planned my day around this. Other lawyers find that their depression hits around 2 p.m. Keep a journal for about a week and pay attention to when this happens to you. A good idea is to wear a sport watch with a timer. Then set it to beep at one or two hour intervals. Write down your mood at that time and rate it between 1 and 10. I think you’ll be surprised to see how your mood changes during the course of the day.

It is not impossible to set goals while depressed. It’s important to watch yourself getting things done. Zoom.

Goals, Depression & Work

I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving — Oliver Wendell Holmes.

There are different concerns at different stages of one’s depression journey. Lawyers who are in the throes of it, perhaps for the first time, need education about what depression is, understanding, medication, support and psychotherapy. After they’ve started to feel better, they’ll need to turn their focus to their livelihood and how they’ll work at it in a way, hopefully, which takes into account their mental health so as prevent and/or mitigate any future depression. Richard O’Connor, Ph.D., author of the best-selling book, Undoing Depression, has this interesting insight about depressives in the workplace:

“Sometimes when I have spoken to business organizations, I have surprised them by advocating for hiring the depressed; but aside from taking more sick days than others, depressed people can be the best employees. We’re [Dr. O’Connor has long struggled with depression] good at being responsible. We are good soldiers, honest and industrious. We have high standards and want to do any job well. We have too much guilt to pad our hours or take home office supplies. Treat us decently, and we’ll be grateful and loyal. Unfortunately for the depressed individual, however, we discount these virtues and have a difficult time enjoying the world of work.”

I think that’s a great insight because overcompensating, even if it makes us miserable, can make us great workers. God knows lawyers have high standards. In essence, many of these people don’t fundamentally value themselves. They may fervently chase other measures of success – money, power and status. Yet, inside, they often feel broken, sad, stressed or depressed. Here’s what Dr. O’Connor said in an interview I had with in New York City about a depressive’s need to value him/herself:

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We tend to think of lawyers as colossal egos bent on being Masters of the Universe; and there probably a good chunk of those people out there — who I never could stand anyway. But, in my experience, there are many accomplished lawyers who suffer from depression who are of different ilk; “good soldiers” who bust their asses and don’t give themselves much, if any, credit.

I was doing a walk-a-talk with a friend of mine [a real non-lawyer type] recently in Central Park in New York City. I stopped to munch on some peanuts that were a real disappointment. He was baffled when I told him I didn’t feel that I’d accomplished much in my professional life. “You were just named to that that publication, ‘The Best Lawyers in America’. For Christ’s sake, count your blessings!”

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to take credit. It was because I couldn’t — I just didn’t know how to. And, as Dr. O’Connor said, not taking credit doesn’t often have much to do with our professional success, but it has a lot to do with our satisfaction with our jobs.

There are emotional bridges that connect us to various aspects of ourselves and our environment. For depressives, there often isn’t an east-bound bridge connecting their good work to their emotional selves. Others may slap them on the back and plaques may parade across their office wall. No matter, there’s still a disconnection; a sense that their accomplishments were an accident or a recent run of Lady Luck. They often have a sense that they’ll be found out; that all of their success is a put-on. They think they’re imposters who truly don’t deserve such accolades – especially from any genuine place inside of them. No matter how distorted this vision is, they’ll insist that it’s true till the cows come home. I know because I’ve banged these drums a few times over the years.

Then there’s the other bridge pointing west-bound. It connects their goof-ups, mistakes and bad decisions to themselves. You see, lawyers have an exaggerated sense of responsibility for bad things and an underdeveloped sense of ownership for the good stuff they do. This take on life isn’t about taking responsibility for our mistakes. Rather, it’s the toxic self-impugning; the inner critic run amok spraying bullets from an AK-47 at our self-esteem.

I’ve come to learn that feeling a sense of satisfaction and pride in my work because of my efforts is a skill that I have to work at – and I’ve come a long way. One of the ways I’ve chosen to do this is by setting goals. For many years, like all lawyers, I swam upstream into the time currents of my day. I didn’t have to set goals about when to get things done because the Court, my firm and other various incendiary devices did that for me. Finishing a set of interrogatories or successfully arguing a Summary Judgment motion, wasn’t a goal that I set for myself – it was simply another deadline in a litany of other deadlines.

Setting goals for ourselves that we’ve personally reflected upon is important step for those who wish to recover from depression. It counters the sense of hopelessness and the confusing lack of direction characteristic of a depressive’s attempts to navigate through life. Goals give us a Garmin for our game.

Even though setting goals would be a healthy thing for someone with depression to work at, they often don’t. Again, Dr. O’Connor:

“Depressed people, pessimistic [a hallmark of lawyers thinking style] and lacking confidence, tend to avoid setting goals as a way to protect themselves from disappointment. They don’t realize that the absence of goals leads to a completely different and frequently worse set of problems. Even if you miss your target, you grow and benefit from the practice of productive activity. But depressed people, who don’t trust their ability to adapt to bad news and hence avoid setting conscious goals, find lives that lack direction. Your goal becomes just getting through another day. In the depths of depression, that may be all you can manage, but it doesn’t take you anywhere.”

Or, as the great Indian Chief Seneca once wrote: “Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.”

Setting simple, realistic and concrete goals improve both our performance of the activity and our actual experience of it. My Catholic take on it from Mother Teresa helps me put this in the context of my part-time faith: “We can’t do great things; only small things with great love.”

Work isn’t just about what is thrown at us by our jobs. It’s also about the passion we bring to it. In this vein, it’s not just the immediate task before us that hooks us, but how we’ve set it up in our own minds. Again, Dr. O’Connor:

“Making a commitment [to a goal] focuses our attention on where we want to go and helps us focus our thinking on getting there. People feel happier as they progress toward their goals; they have a sense of involvement, they feel productive and useful, and they give themselves ego strokes for being good and industrious. Because we’re so adaptable, however, those good feelings don’t necessarily last once we’ve got to where we are going. We have to make a deliberate effort to savor and appreciate our achievements.”

The key words are deliberate effort. The word “deliberate” comes from the Latin word “deliberates” which means to weigh carefully. It requires us to reflect on our course of action and think about what actually works and what doesn’t for us on the job.

In my experience, depressives are often lacking the goal-setting skills they need to be happy and content in their work lives. What’s the consequence of not setting goals is a sense of meaninglessness; ennui that won’t go away. Depressed lawyers have an inner dialogue that goes something like this: “I have all this paperwork to get to today, but I have to be in court all morning. And . . . oh shit!! I forgot to call the judge back on that motion.” And so it goes as these worrisome thoughts pour out of our noggins. We’re just jumping around putting out fires and surviving our days. Is it really any wonder that we draw little or no satisfaction from our work with this approach?

When I talk to depressed lawyers about this and suggest that they think about their goals and what they really want to achieve, you would have thought that I asked them to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge: “Are you kidding? You want me to spend time thinking about my goals? When the hell do I have time to do that? I have no time during work and then when I get home I either want to (a) forget about my day and enjoy my family, (b) pass out on the couch and forget about everything in front of the T.V. or (c) do anything that doesn’t involve thinking about my job.

There’s no problem in using these ways to decompress after a day’s warfare at the office. But if these activities, albeit pleasurable, avoid the important questions raised by work, and our connection to it, we may to rebalance the tires.

In my next blog, I will address some practical ways lawyers can set goals and draw pleasure from accomplishing them in their everyday work lives.

Mindful On The Job

Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying – Studs Turkel, author

Sunday night rolls around all too quickly. The weekend, if we actually give ourselves a break from our jobs, can’t often prepare us for the frenzy of the week’s activity at the office that awaits us. If we like our jobs as lawyers – and granted there are alot of us who do – we still may feel it’s half-baked- “it still could be better” we think to ourselves.

Michael Carroll, author of the book, Awake at Work, was employed at such places as Shearson Lehman, American Express and The Walt Disney Company. More recently, he has been a consultant and coach to such companies as Starbucks and Proctor and Gamble. His comments, into what workers really want out of their jobs, is insightful to the lives of lawyers on the job:

“In my role as a business consultant, I regularly ask my clients to complete the following sentence with the first word that comes to mind:

At work, I want to be. . .

While my survey is not scientifically reliable, I can report there are some patterns to the responses. Here are the four most frequent answers:

Successful
Happy
Rewarded
Stress-free

Such responses come as no surprise. Given the demands, risks and relentless pace of our modern-day workplace, it is little wonder that most of us would like a little stress-free happiness on occasion. Rewards and success-isn’t that what we are all looking for at work?”

Who can’t relate to that take on the legal profession? Whether we are happy in our jobs or not, we all think about how we can embrace more of these intangibles while at the office.

Carroll, in addition to being in the business world for the past forty-four years, is a long-time meditator and proponent of mindfulness meditation. Here’s a great introduction to what Mindfulness is about:

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You don’t have to be a Buddha sitting in a lotus garden to appreciate this fundamental and simple way of approaching your day. It’s not so much a different way of doing and accomplishing stuff; lawyers are great at that. Rather, it’s a different way of seeing at work. Moreover, seeing via a discipline of mindfulness meditation, seeks to plant our feet directly on the carpet. It’s not so much about being alert and wired to the swirling stimuli peppering us from every angle. It’s taking a time-out and leaning against the wall; it’s about letting the other half of our brain complement our eagerness to get things done.

Coming back to Michael Carroll’s survey about what people want out of their work, he opines that it’s not really success, happiness, being reward and a stress-free work-life:

“My survey indicates that most of us think we want to happy, successful, and to be stress-free at work, but we also know that such aspirations are wishful thinking. We all know work offers both success and failure; happiness and angst. We know that work, indeed all of life, unavoidably presents both rewards and penalties; joys and disappoints. So, while most of us wish to be happy and successful at work, what we really want, from my vantage point, is to be confident: confident that no matter what work offers up, we remain self-assured and at our ease.”

In my experience, truer words were never spoken. As lawyers, there is a wonderful sense we get about our craft when we achieve a certain level of competence and feel that we can handle whatever down the pike. We can acheive this sense of competence not just through the nuts and bolts of accomplishments in the courtroom, but through practice as sense of presence in our daily lives.

Explore how mindfulness meditation can help you at the office. Also, for those so inclined, check out the wonderful book, which I’ve previously raved about, The Mindfulway Through Depression. It’s not only for those with depression, but suitable for anyone who struggles with a sense of dissatisfaction and/or unhappiness at work.

Walking in Bigger Shoes

Lawyers are an earnest, disciplined bunch. They love evidence – the “show me the money” approach to life. They’re hard-bitten pessimist, yet love the latest self-improvement projects pitched to them by the legal establishment. You know — graphs, charts and the Oprah-like cattle call to “Change Your Life in Five Easy Steps!” The goal of all these books and slogans is Happiness, as if it were a commodity for sale. There was a snappy piece yesterday in the New York Times Review of Books entitled, “The Rap on Happiness.” It’s a great take on this country’s obsession with finding the veritable Oz of bliss.

“The real problem with happiness is neither its pursuers nor their books; its happiness itself. Happiness is like beauty: part of its glory lies in transience. It is deep but often brief (as the poet Robert Frost would have it), and much great prose and poetry make note of this. Frank Kermode wrote, ‘It seems there is sort of a calamity built into the texture of life.’ To hold happiness is to hold understanding that the world passes away from us, that the petals fall and the beloved dies. No amount of mockery, no amount of fashionable scowling will keep any of us from knowing and savoring the pleasure of the sun on our faces or save us from the adult understanding that it cannot last forever.”

Lawyers walk in shoes that are too small for them, living lives that are too confining, unimaginative and which fail to challenge them to be their best. They need to switch from pinching wing-tips to cushy loafers. This switch gives a vital bounce to their steps rather than a lugubrious gait. The opposite of depression isn’t happiness; it’s vitality. It’s like a Swordfish bounding out of the ocean’s waves in defiance of gravity or B.B. King playing a blues riff on his guitar. They have a vibrancy that can’t be contained; they express themselves in a space where great stuff happens.

Part of the equation involves not so much pills or therapy, as the lifting up of our individual imaginations. Putting aside what’s possible in a concrete sense ( you know, the mortgage or student loans), have you ever looked out your office window and imagined the life you’d like to have? This is not the same as rumination; a constant churning of negative thoughts in our cranium which a depressive is prone to.

Rather, it’s an exercise in lively engagement with our Self. To engage in this effort, we have to pop our life’s stick shift out of “Neutral”, the frozen state that depression and/or anxiety can keep us stuck again. Locate the “Drive” on your shift and engage.

In this exercise, it might be helpful to think about the choices we make in a different way. Not in a self-recriminating way, but in a fashion that moves us in a constructive direction. We need to separate the wheat from the chaff in our lives; to decide what reduces or enlarges our spirits. Quality questions can help in regard. Not the common lament of depressives, “What the hell is wrong with me?” That’s a dreary question that goes nowhere because the answer we give ourselves is – – “Everything!” James Hollis, Ph.D., in his wonderful book, “What Matters Most: Living a More Considered Life” offers us a keen approach ourselves to view ourselves:

“Ask yourself of every dilemma, every choice, every relationship, every commitment, or every failure to commit, ‘Does this choice diminish me, or enlarge me?’ Do not ask this question if you are afraid of the answer. You might be afraid of what your soul will require of you, but at least you then know your marching orders.”

Incline your inner ear. Listen to your response to this challenging question. Enlargement of one’s self isn’t so much about happiness, as meaning. Deep down, we all want a life of purpose; where we feel our lives have a point, or many points of light for that matter. You don’t have to look far. It’s right beneath your bouncing feet.

Turning Your Life Around

Lawyers often sense that their lives have gone off track; they just don’t know how to fix them. They’re hit by daily demands that make it difficult to find their true north.

There are the demands that hurtle at them from the lives they occupy – the boss that’s yammering for more billable hours, families that feel upset by all the hours they spend at work or you-name-it-crap from this frenzied world.

Then there are the demands that emanate from somewhere inside of them; the part of themselves – their true selves – that wants a life with less stress, more meaning and a sense of connectedness to other people. While they pine for such a life while looking outside their law office windows, such reverie gives them a brief respite from the grind. But after the moment has passed, there’s an abiding sorrow. A sense that something has been lost that can’t be found.

Perpetual stress can keep lawyers from ever dealing – in a constructive and persistent way – with what they really want in life. They check their Blackberry’s more than check in with themselves. They don’t really know what they want most of the time; they just know that it’s not this. Emotional pain may be leaking out of them; for some lawyers, this has been going on for years. The pain might be mitigated in healthy (e.g. exercise) or unhealthy (e.g. drinking, drugs) ways. But, it will not go away – until they turn around and face themselves.

Lawyers need to become conscious of the choices they’re making during their waking hours. Of course, there’re exceptions, but the majority of lawyers have choices. They aren’t victims that are being forced to stay at their jobs. They’re choosing to stay at their jobs and do the work they’re paid to do.

Most lawyers, however, just don’t see it this way. They feel stuck in their jobs and lives with few viable alternatives. As odd as it may sound, they feel like victims. Friends of mine who aren’t lawyers scoff at my observation: “Lawyers victims? Give me a break.” Nonetheless, it’s true on an emotional level for many lawyers.

Lawyers can feel this way because (a) the “golden handcuffs” in which they’re just making too much money to quit; (b) they’re in too much debt; (c) they’d rather complain than face the abject fear that comes with making tough changes; or (d) they’re simply paralyzed by stress, anxiety or depression.

However, by turning from a stuck-victim status to a choice-maker posture they can begin to awaken to their true potential. They might have to make small changes in their lives or maybe a closet full of whoppers. Perhaps they’ll have to go back to the drawing board of their lives and sift through and separate what’s really important versus what’s trivial. This will take time; let nobody fool you on this one. People in our country are basically impatient; we want relief from our distress NOW. But, meaningful and realistic changes never seem to unfold this way. That’s just the facts-o-life.

Turning your life around may come down to this: What are you willing to do to change your life? Lots of people — not just lawyers — know that their lives aren’t working. The same group approaches their lives with all the right intentions of changing it for better. Most, however, will not change despite the chorus of voices from within telling them to do so.

I had a friend who would call me once a month and lament how unhappy he was. I’d listen for thirty minutes and then he, having discharged his discomfort, would say goodbye only to repeat this weather pattern about thirty days later.

Finally, six month in this telephonic waltz, I said “Tom, what are you willing to do to change your about life?” The question must have stunned him like a taser because there was silence — a dead silence — on the other end of the line. He evaded the question, said we would have to get together soon for lunch and hung up. Tom never called again.

Tom didn’t really want to change – – he wanted to bitch, a common past-time for many lawyers. He wanted my sympathetic ear to appreciate just how much he’d been screwed over by opposing counsel, an irate judge or his cranky wife. I had sympathy for Tom, but also a good deal of frustration because I realized that I wasn’t really helping him.

I would ask you the reader: “What are you willing to do to change your life” Are you willing to the feel the free floating anxiety that’s inevitable if you are to start changing your life? The longer the discontent goes on, the bigger the changes will have to be. The longer we delay, the bigger the kick in the pants from Life to wake us up.

Yes, work is only a part of life and many lawyers no doubt find outlets of meaning and joy along other avenues. However, as Gregg Levoy, author of Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life, such sizing up of our days miscalculates the energy and time we must invest in our daily jobs:

“Work is merely one of the arenas in which you play the game – the one the Gods are watching from the press-box atop Mount Olympus while sipping mint juleps. It is only one of the arenas in which you express your humanity, search for meaning, play out your destiny and dreams, contribute your energies and gifts to the world and spend your precious nick of time. It is also an arena in which you spend two-thirds of your waking lifetime and it is legitimate to love your work! Life is a thousand times too short to bore yourself. If someday your life does flash in front of your eyes, the very least you want it to do is hold your interest.”