Dwell

"And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while"

-Mark 6:31

I remember reading years ago about a child chess prodigy who was able to move from chessboard to chessboard, brilliantly defeating the wily old chess masters opposing him at each.

I'm guessing part of the reason he was able to pull off this feat is that his brain at eight years old is uncluttered, and not muddled with alcohol and arterial plaque and the worries of the world those old guys are carrying around.

I found myself thinking of him during this week of trial prep, as I try to sit down and concentrate on the array of quite complex legal issues we'll be presenting to a Bay County jury on Monday. This case has been cooking along for over two years, and has presented some vexing legal questions arising out of what should be a simple story of neighbors fussing over an easement. But it's only in the last few days that I have had the chance for an extensive ponder of how we shoehorn that story into jury instructions and legal arguments. Better late than never, I guess.

Why has it taken until now for the epiphanies to float to the fore of my consciousness, for my thinking to gain a little clarity for once? Sharing the impediments of those old guys playing chess with the junior genius hasn't helped, and none of that is going to get better as I age.

But the bigger problem is that I'm trying to play the game of life like the kid in the sailor suit, when I'm not that anymore, and maybe never was. One cannot seamlessly move from conference call to conference call, or deposition to hearing to dictating a motion in three different cases over the course of an afternoon, day after day, and ever grasp the big picture in any of those files. Insight takes time, takes idleness, takes quiet.

In this frenetic society we've built, and frenetic practice I pretend to manage, there's precious little of that.

Back in the old days I used to find time for reflexion out on the West Bay in my little McKee Craft, watching the sun come up on a stretch of water where cellphone coverage was spotty back then, and one rarely encountered another boat. It was just miles of stillness, where I could think and recharge.

We all need that, even as the world makes it harder to attain. Hell, even Jesus needed to go to a desert place on a three-day silent retreat, except for conversations with Satan, who apparently was just hanging around waiting for a quiet moment to vex Jesus with some tough decisions about what to do with his gifts, and to help Jesus shape his theology and sense of his purpose in the world. Before that time he was just a little Jewish prodigy amazing his neighbors in the first recorded version of what Baptists call "sword drills", quoting scripture and telling folks the words were about him. Coming down from that desert place years later, he carried a vision that would change the world.

So, how to create my own desert places, not only to return a little intellectual vigor to my practice, but also to sit and wait for insights as I enter this last phase of life?

The office seems the most deceptively easy part. I mostly schedule things when clients want them, interrupting quiet time better spent strategizing or writing or researching. Those things fall by the wayside if I stop to take a call from a client whining about the pace of his or her case.

So perhaps I start acting more like a surgeon, and less like a family practitioner. A surgeon has his clinic days, with high speed patient encounters over the course of one or two days a week. The rest of the time he or she is spending an hour, or maybe several, laser focused on one thing in an operating room. Maybe I just need to block "clinic" days in advance, with a call every thirty minutes all day long until everyone's had their pointless-but-billable conversation, and then assiduously protect those days where there's "nothing" scheduled. That "nothing" in fact could be time spent on the higher level functions that distinguish a great lawyer from a hamburger.

Of course, the court system may have something to say about all this high-minded scheduling. Judges command hearings; scheduling orders dictate that depositions be completed by a certain date. I won't always play the role of some sort of law shaman when I'm not speed-dialing through my appointments. But if this system preserves at least a day or two every week for thinking work, I'll be significantly better off than in this endless reactive mode in which I find myself these days.

And I need to have a regularly scheduled file review day for each of my cases, blocking an hour or so every month to open the file, consider and revise the plan for moving it forward, and decide what needs to happen to adhere to that plan. It's not enough to blow the dust off the file when a client calls the office wanting an update. Again, that's reacting and not acting strategically.

This all means there need to be far fewer cases in the cabinet than at present. One can't do quality work on the fly, and although the pandemic slowed the pace of litigation so dramatically that a higher volume felt more manageable, those days are gone. I'm going to be a hell of a lot more selective with new cases going forward.

Finally, I've fallen away from my prior adherence to the commandment that I "remember the sabbath and keep it holy." I'm not talking about spending more time in church; it was all that church stuff that eroded the barriers that protected my down time, as I scrambled between church and office and the boys during my priestly days. Back in law school I had a strict rule that there would be no study or mention of the law from 5 pm on Friday until after church on Sunday. It's definitely time to take that back, to give my tired old sclerotic brain a chance to recharge a little. Which probably also means getting outdoors or otherwise finding a way to keep that sabbath time from turning into a cocktail party that defeats the whole purpose of the exercise.

All nice thoughts, Donk. Let's see if you do any of it.