Pushing the rock up the hill

A rainy Sunday morning seems to attract more coffee drinkers to the inside tables, and leaves the tables outside standing empty in the drenching cold.  Go figure.  This particular Peet's is located near where quite a few street people hang out, and so the rain drives them to shelter as well.  So I can't help feeling fortunate to have snagged the table in the corner by the front windows.  Here I feel cocooned and comfortable, in spite of the dripping sky.

My weekends are divided more by subject matter than by day-names, and so Friday evening was Bus Orgs, Saturday was Bar Prep (and some time spent perusing Netflix), and today is Remedies.  My pursuit of something to watch on Netflix nearly always nets me nothing, and I found myself watching a reality show about a family who live in a remote area of Alaska, and live by hunting, fishing and growing their own food and other requirements.  That was probably not a good use of my Saturday evening, but I did manage to get my laundry done too, so all was not lost.

In three months, law school will be done.  I'll still have the bar to face, but the tenor of my days will certainly shift.  Weekends will be something else.  I know I'll adapt, since I have done so before.  But I know too that the adaptation is not instantaneous, and generally comes in spite of my pitiful and ineffectual efforts to maintain in place.  I'd like to think that this next transition will be made mindfully and with intent, but I know enough to laugh at such conceit.  I really don't know what it looks like to an onlooker, but my own sense of how I transition is like the little boy in the comic strip whose idea of going from one place to another involves many detours.  Then one day I wake up and find that I have moved from one place to another, in spite of myself.  It's messy and unfocused.

Jung says, "However much energy may be present, we cannot make it serviceable until we have succeeded in finding the right gradient."  When I began law school, that was perhaps an external indication of a change in gradient in my life.  In hindsight I see that it had to have begun earlier, and the decision to go to school at 50 was the effect, rather than the cause.  Seeing law school as a stage on a longer journey, up a gradient of my choosing, helps me find some ease about the transition to come.