Time for the weather-worn and much maligned New Year’s resolution. January is an opportune time to stop and take inventory. This year, my resolution is to meditate regularly. I invite all of you lawyers to do the same. No, I did not join a cult or turn 40. It just makes sense.
Why should you let some arbitrary date on the calendar dictate the timing of critical decisions about your well-being? Because you’ve had an opportunity to spend two glorious nearly uninterrupted weeks with your loved ones, which served as a palpable reminder of what’s important — all things considered — and you also consumed industrial quantities of food and yuletide cheer (booze) during that time and no longer fit into last year’s pants…
Meditation must have been invented for lawyers. Lawyers work long hours at stressful jobs, are often out of shape, are prone to depression and substance abuse, and have high rates of suicide and divorce. Happy new year! Many of us lawyers are too mired in the drudgery of our daily routine or too fixated on the objects of our own single-minded ambition to stop and ask ourselves: Who and where am I now? What is important to me? Ain’t nobody needs meditation more than lawyers do! Firms should make it part of mandatory training.
We are so outwardly focussed and so busy moving forward that we lose ourselves. Most of us have to work to support our families and pay our mortgage. Some of us work to buy stuff while others work to bankroll the activities outside of work that they feel truly passionate about. We spend the better part of our existence sitting at a desk at the dictate of someone else. That’s probably more than twice as much time spent with our loved ones. And there are those, of course, who genuinely enjoy what they do but unfortunately spend far too much time doing it at the expense of other competing priorities and obligations. The unexamined life thrives on a busy schedule.
Sitting there at your desk at 9 p.m. on a Friday with the ethereal glow of your computer as the only light source (because security has turned off the building lights and everyone in their right mind went home hours ago), there comes a time when you must ask yourself: What the heck am I doing? I often hear that it’s so much easier for single or childless people. I don’t believe that’s true or fair because they too have better things to do with their time than be at the office on a Friday night. With children, however, the source of malaise is readily identifiable.
Meditation keeps you in touch with your own feelings and if nothing else can bring a little peace to the most insane day. You don’t need a mat, candles, Lululemon pants or the Dalai Lama. Just close your eyes, breathe deeply and try to clear your mind for a few minutes at your desk every day. Educational materials on meditation abound, as does soothing bamboo flute music on YouTube.
Take this as a call to arms for all of us lawyers to be a little bit more mindful this year and a lot more protective of that sacred and precious voice that says, “go home now, while you are still missed.”
Sandra Rosier is a former Supreme Court of Canada clerk who has worked at large firms in Toronto and Boston. Having come to her senses, Sandra currently works as a tax advisor at a Toronto-based organization. Her etiquette column for lawyers appears every other Monday at lawandstyle.ca. Got a question for Sandra? Email us.
Photo: Kalyan Kumar via Wikimedia Commons / Flickr