Just breathe.
May 9, 2011
I went home for a friend’s wedding this weekend, and it was great. Todd and Jennifer are among my favorite people, and they’re wonderful for each other, and I got to spend time with both my real family and people who may as well be.
It’s funny, then, that I spent so much time this afternoon beating myself up for doing it. See, I have these exams this week, and in some ways I probably should have stayed at home and spent the weekend preparing for them, especially since the tighter scheduling means that the time I used last week to decompress is not available this week. That’ll be tough.
The long and the short of it is that I lost it for a little while this afternoon in a way that I usually don’t. I let myself get so upset with everything I had to do that I couldn’t do anything else. So, I did the only thing I could really do at that point: I shut down. I closed my laptop, sat down in front of my TV, and watched an episode of Castle that I recorded last week but hadn’t had time to watch yet. I think, to some extent, I just needed a few minutes of distraction to let the adrenaline spike wear off, but what really settled me down was this song that played at the end of the episode. I’d never heard it before, but there was one little set of lyrics right at the beginning:
“I’m a lucky man, to count on both hands
the ones I love.
Some folks just have one,
yeah, others, they’ve got none…”
So I went and looked it up once the episode ended, and it turns out it was a song called “Just Breathe,” by Pearl Jam (you would think I’d recognize Eddie Vedder’s mouth-full-of-food singing by now). I found a video on YouTube, and watched it once. Then I looked up the lyrics and watched it again. And I felt better.
You see, the hardest thing for me about this first year of law school has been keeping perspective. It’s such an isolated little universe that it’s really easy to lose track of the wider world and what all this work really means.
It’s a lot like Monet. Now, I’m not a terribly artsy person, but the Nelson has all three panels of one of Monet’s paintings of water lilies, which even I know are kind of a big deal. Saturday afternoon between the wedding and the reception, we went and saw it, and I gotta tell you, I was blown away. It was beautiful in a way that I’m not sure I can actually put into words. The funny thing is, though, if you stand close to it, it looks like nothing. I mean, parts of it, you can still kind of see that it was someone painting water lilies, but even those parts, it kind of seems like whoever was doing the painting wasn’t very good at it. But you step back from it, and suddenly it becomes something else entirely. At the risk of sounding hokey, it’s somehow a better picture than it would be if it were more detailed. But then, when you walk up close again, it turns back into paint smudges.
When that happens, suddenly it’s easy for me to end up in a place where my grade on this contracts exam (that’s frankly probably impossible to study for effectively anyway) seems more important than family. And that’s not a place where I’m ever happy to be.
So I ended up spending this afternoon and evening both studying and putting my head back together, and I feel better about things. Instead of being upset about how absurd my Tuesday exam is likely to be, I’m laughing at them a little bit, and thinking about a book I read a long time ago by Robert Heinlein:
“I had thought — I had been told — that a ‘funny’ thing is a thing of a goodness. It isn’t. Not ever is it funny to the person it happens to. Like that sheriff without his pants. The goodness is in the laughing itself. I grok it is a bravery . . . and a sharing… against pain and sorrow and defeat.”
I needed that. Maybe others can function with the kind of pressures that come from needing to know that I’ll succeed on this, but I can’t. I want to do well, and I intend to do as well as I can. But at the end of the day, it’ll be okay. If I raise my GPA enough to keep my scholarship, that will be wonderful. If I don’t, I’ll survive that, too, because in 10 years, it’s not going to matter what grade I got on Royce’s exam. If it’s worth remembering at all, it’ll be a funny story I tell to my kids or some poor soul starting out in law school. What will matter is that I got through it, and the people that helped me do that.
