"And now we welcome the new year. Full of things that have never been."
-Rainer Maria Rilke
Peggy reads another blog this morning, and announces it's colder in Panama City than in Corning. It's happened before, but doesn't ring true this time. I check my weather app. It's 33 and cloudy in Corning right now, 40 in Panama. Close but not quite.
So, 2024 is upon us, and P and I haven't really made any New Year's resolutions, although there's some informal goal-setting at Tara this week. Dry January, for instance. It's a thing, this taking a month off from drinking. We both feel a little squishier around the middle and doughier between the ears after a holiday season that included more than the usual lineup of holiday parties and opportunities to overindulge a bit. With that in mind, this is the second day of our month of abstinence. I don't feel any different, but we've taken these temperance vacations before, and I know it'll be a few days before I feel so great that the only thing that might make this moment better would be a nice glass of wine. That's when the monthlong resolution becomes a challenge.
But we're doing this together, P and I, and the mutual accountability is often cited as a key to success in following through on a resolution. Plus, it'd be nice to drop back to a less embarrassing weight.
In a larger sense, this feels like a season for figuring out a next act, maybe building on what we've done to this point. It's hit Peg before it settled over me--her profession is a lot more physically demanding than mine, and tends to wear out its troops a lot faster than the law. But I'm feeling it too, this disdain for sitting through depositions and hours of mind-numbing discovery, for having to pull to the side of the road on a family trip, as I did the other day in Ithaca, to triangulate among phone conferences necessitated by a client's self-created, eleventh hour emergency. None if it was ever fun; now I just dread the exercise, while never losing sight of the fact that it's paid for the good things in my life, to the extent those come with a monetary price tag.
It seems like I'm not the only one wrestling with this transition from young buck leaning into a busy career and tired late-middle-ager who's coping with increasing irrelevance. [some of that irrelevance is self-imposed, of course, with my habit of staying out of town for a few weeks at a time, but it would be a generational fact regardless]. David Brooks in the Atlantic wrote recently about folks hitting that 60 to 70 window and going back to school for a year to figure out what their call really might be, and who they really are when the end of professional life robs them of their identities.
His fairly privileged subjects spend a year at Harvard or Stanford or Notre Dame re-imagining their life's narrative, their "hero's journey" as Joseph Campbell put it, and then usually going off in a direction totally distinct from the three or four decades of work preceding the transition. Lawyers become playwrights. Tech barons become painters.
I don't see myself doing any of that, or at least nothing as radical. There are few more years of alimony in the headlights in front of me, and if Peg's working I sure as hell can't justify dropping law to become a novelist or some such.
Rather, what's attracted me of late is the opportunity to perhaps enter an executive master of laws program in tax, and spending the next three years learning in depth a subject I brush against professionally with increasing regularity.
Finding my bliss through mastering the tax code? Can I be serious?
Hear me out on this.
There's often an organic progression among lawyers, particularly trial lawyers who handle a lot of business litigation. Over time the calls from clients are less requests to draft an emergency injunction or sue a client before he sues them, and more with regard to structuring a business deal, or helping them plan for their senescence and demise in a way that allows their families to meet financial goals. Less time arguing; more time thinking, drafting, and having fairly deep conversations to help clients with this next phase. Lots of lawyers make this transition with no tax training, but that strikes me as lazy and a little stupid. Every one of these sorts of engagements has a tax overlay to it; how can one competently advise without specialized training?
Plus, there's this archipelago of stuff and places we've accumulated, with the hope that someday they might provide a little passive income for us. P and I have tried for a couple years to find competent financial planning advice, offering to pay whatever is reasonable to quit handing over such a huge chunk of what we make to the tax man. Our quest has led us to a combination of hucksters, salesmen, and competent folks who are too busy to mess with small fries like us. So maybe I'll just learn to be our tax guy. With the amounts flowing from us to the IRS, that degree will pay for itself within a year or two.
Finally, there's the need for something to keep my brain from turning into mush. Seminary did that, and having to learn enough koine Greek to engage in exegesis grounded in some measure of objective fact (like lawyers who give estate and business advice with no LLM, there are plenty of preachers out there who purport to guide their flocks through scripture without a syllable of Greek or Hebrew. This strikes me as pastoral malpractice, but it's more the norm than the exception). Simply put, I need to be learning something all the time. Maybe it's a distraction from some deep void in my soul, but I think more realistically I just enjoy learning for learning's sake, and need a challenge that doesn't involve a billable hours or collections goal.
So here I sit, sober and about to fill out a law school application for the first time in thirty years. It's shaping up to be quite a year.
Cover Painting: Happy Old Age
Harvard has the extension school for regular folk to earn a Masters, even has a history program. Same classes and professors, its just geared toward working adults. Im sure learning Attic Greek or Latin at Harvard would help stop any mental mush from starting... :)