"Breathe deep the gathering gloom."
-Late Lament, The Moody Blues
Sitting in this space that Peg promises to turn into a more inviting office soon.
As you can see, she has her work cut out for her. I understand a new desk is in the pipeline for sometime in the next couple weeks. That will be a good start.
A light schedule, on this shortest day of the year. And a good thing, too--I'm still not 100% after my booster and flu shots on Sunday; plus, I'm back to not being able to sleep between about 1:00 and 4:30 each night, flopping around in bed like a boated cobia dodging a gaff. After suffering from insomnia for years, it disappeared for a while before returning over the last few weeks.
Why is that, exactly?
It's probably not simply the macro annoyances and worries of life, including this sunny piece about how Putin is militarizing Russia, even bringing back his own version of the Hitler Youth without a hint of irony, to get everyone leaning into this project of his of bringing about the end of the world in a thermonuclear war, starting with a threatened invasion of Ukraine our intelligence services seem to think is coming on Christmas Eve. A nice touch, that.
I probably wouldn't care much, but for the fact that my beloved son lives in Moscow. I wish he'd come home. Although it seems everyone is competing to be a police state these days, Russia seems a lot farther down that path than most. Maybe I'd sleep on a softer pillow if I didn't keep encountering this late night internal video of my boy getting picked up by fur-hatted goons.
So there's that.
And somehow, after nearly a quarter century of practicing law and doing just fine, I still worry constantly about money. This has been a better year than most, but it seems like filling the bowl with more gravy just brings a bigger biscuit. There's no getting ahead, ever.
Adding to my angst on this front was the failure of a couple good clients to pay their bills before the firm closed its books for the year yesterday. One called to apologize even before I had time to complain, saying his wife had forgotten to pay our bill for the last three months. He's hoping they'll get us a check before they leave in their private plane for a family vacation in the Bahamas.
I've taken this client's calls on Saturday morning, or a late Sunday afternoon on the farm.
Another promised to pay by close of business yesterday, and simply didn't do it. I hear from that one at all hours, as well.
For a very long time, I've spent quality moments in the two a.m. darkness with deadlines and various forms of legal peril from my sixty-something cases in suit, all swirling around in my head. These days it's much worse, both because of the challenges of working remotely, and the acute training gaps in our office. On any given day something will be filed by our folks calling the defendant the plaintiff, misspelling a client's name, captioning a court filing for the wrong circuit . . . I could go on. This job is hard enough without having one's professional legs cut out from under him back at the office.
So what will today's professional embarrassment be? I can hardly wait to find out.
Of course, I've brought this on myself with my experiment of practicing from two or three different places I'd rather be than the office. To make it work, I suppose all I have to do is go back to drafting all my own documents, proofreading everyone else's work product syllable-by-syllable, and keeping my own calendar (although lately they've gotten better about not frantically calling at the last minute to let me know someone put a conference call on the schedule in two minutes, or more often two minutes ago). I'll just bill a lot less time, and make less money.
See prior worry topic, supra.
Then there are the health concerns that seem to accompany advancing age in a high stress job. A twitching leg in the middle of the night. Nagging heartburn and that knot right under my sternum I'm hoping isn't a tumor, but I can't seem to get an endoscopy scheduled to find out. Cheek chewed raw from years of compulsive behavior--that'll probably turn into something lethal if the scorched esophagus doesn't do it.
But really, it's all in our head, isn't it? There's the stuff we can't control for the most part, the neurochemical soup we're born with or condition into dysfunction with a regular dosing of happy hour libations. On the other hand, there's the part we can control, I can control--one's thoughts, and modalities to address when they wax negative and the imagination runs wild with "what ifs" that include everything from professional humiliation to death in a hospice ward. What to do with all that? It would go a long way toward getting back to sleep, and moving toward recovering my health, to find a way to shout back at those phantoms.
My solution, being a Bowman and therefore prone to searching out solutions to life's problems by reading other people's musings on any given subject, has been this morning to order a book, Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It, by Ethan Kross. I ran across the title in an article I was reading in Inc. Magazine over the morning's coffee (another great heartburn trigger, along with cabernet, fried green tomatoes, biscuits and gravy--Ye Gods! Who would want to live in a world without those things? Then again, if the choice is between living without them and not living at all . . .). Kross's thesis, which I'll explore in more detail over the next few days, is that we're all engaged in an ongoing conversation in our own head, and the quality and tone of that conversation shapes how we view our lives and the world around us. He also suggests ways to manipulate the tenor of that internal dialogue for the better.
Peg's observed that my inner voice is not particularly positive, an artifact from growing up in a household in which affirmation could turn into derision like flipping a switch. And I'm not very good at letting go of the array of failures and embarrassments that have accumulated over this life, just like anyone else I guess.
So we'll work on that, the voice in my head and I, and maybe eventually I'll be able to sleep again. In the meantime, I'll need to find a way to slog through a sleep deprived day of drafting things and talking on the phone. I may also buy a truck for the farm, on the advice of our accountant.
Selah.
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