why follow the yellow brick road?

The stated purpose of this blog is to chronicle life as a law student in middle age. The thing is that so many other things combine to make up life, and I find it difficult to limit my comments to law related topics alone. Everything informs the next thing. When you make something, you make something else. Cause and effect, a stone thrown into the water creates ripples long after it is gone from sight. And so it is with my life. While law school is engaging and demanding, I still have a more than full time job that also demands much of me. And I have two grown children, a grandchild, brothers, sister, elderly parents. My yard still needs mowed and my clothes need laundered. I have to make decisions about how I will eat, how I will live as a citizen of the world. And unlike when I was 20 and an undergrad, those decisions can't wait, and are not just discussions of what I am going to do. They are the here and now, I've lived more life than I have still left to live, and time's awasting. I must not put off important things until after law school. I must choose priorities and find ways to fit in what matters. And of course, I still need to pass my exams, and I want to excel at them.

You ask why I have chosen this monumental undertaking at this point in my life? It was time. It was time to start down the path that will finish out my working days (I hope). More than that, it was time to learn again, to challenge myself, to prevent myself from becoming complacent and stuck. Since we apparently only get one run at this thing we call life, and since I feel the loss of time, I had to figure out how best to fully inhabit my days. Not being independently wealthy, I am going to spend more of my waking hours at work than anyplace else for at least the next 20 years. And that means that what I do for work, how I spend those hours, really matters. I know that how I treat my fellow human beings, my earth, my soul, my body, all these matter. But if that same sense of values is not in some way integrated into how I earn a paycheck, I am missing the greatest opportunity to fully inhabit my days that I have.

I don't know where this will take me, but I feel serene in the belief that this is where I should be right now. And that is enough for the moment. All the rest of life is swirling around, and I am not certain of the wisdom of so many other choices, but this one thing I know. I belong in law school today.