On Spring Vibes
Whoo, so much for trying to be consistent. In my defense (to the void) there is a significant amount of stuff going on at work, and with some of our senior folks leaving for the green pastures of multimillion (tbh at this point its multibillion, damn capitalism working as god intended) dollar firms, the reshuffling, big ticket things, and random fires have a fervor unlike anything I've seen before. Super interesting stuff, thankful that I'm helping out on meaningful things, happy that it's fulfilling, good that some of it is public, all of that blah blah blah, it's busy folks.
But. Let's take back a bit of time and see what's cooking. Today, I want to write about something that I've gabbed with friends and close colleagues about for what has to be years now - my reflections on springtime. Now, this could go any number of ways. I could talk about the weather, I could talk about the new flowers and leaves (and weeds, fuck the weeds man) sprouting up around the neighborhood, people getting more uppity to be outside, etc etc, and yeah I guess that's all relevant for springtime, but not what's on my mind.
The thing that I'm getting at is a bit less concrete - springtime as a vibe. And the vibe I've been most interested in is springtime as a set of realizations, reminders, and feelings unique to this time of year. Why these specific musings?
It's because it's commencement season. For the uninitiated (and really it shouldn't come as a surprise), I have always loved school and the idea of schooling. The pure pursuit of learning, being surrounded by a properly insane mix of brilliance and stupidity, finding your niche, and at base finding what it is that makes you tick inside and outside the classroom stands as one of the great memories and milestones of my life. Indeed, if I wasn't so pressed to, you know, pay bills, I would have dove headfirst into being a professor (shouts to my incredibly lucky classmates who actually did that - god damn you guys, what a life).
Anyway - the consumation of all that effort, all that discovery, the season of commencement, has always been a very special time of year for me (sue me), and usually results in me thinking a bit more wistfully than I usually do. In some ways a lot of the vibe I'm trying to put into words is pure sentiment, excess romanticism. The faces of elation of closing one chapter and opening another, the burst of the pinnacle of youth before the stupendous fall of adulthood, the photographs, the regalia, the pomp and circumstance, the pantomime and pageantry - I simply cannot get enough, and I am lucky that I've been able to enmesh myself in many commencements - both my own, and those of my friends and family.
In another way, and perhaps what is more to the point, the vibe also represents a view toward the unknown - what I mean by realizations, reminders, and feelings. The example that comes to mind is perhaps unique to my line of work, and how it stacks up with that of my colleagues with a different kind of "D" after their name. For us lawyers, commencement (and really the years of law school as a singular experience) is a representation of the next chapter, a start toward the bar, that first job, that first time you get a chance to prove you're a grown up. For me and many of my peers, that all centered around biglaw - becoming corporate sharks, prowling the mean streets of DC, NYC, Chicago, LA, Miami, Austin, Toronto, etc, closing deals, popping off demand letters, standing up in federal court and playing our best unflappable selves (god how insufferable we must have been - but has anything really changed lol). For others, it was about doing justice - defending the little guy, or more often than not going after the bad guy (who also happened to usually be the little guy). Perhaps more noble pursuits, but tinged with that cloying badge of authority, the aura of importance.
The comparison (and I promise I'll get to the point here, dear void), and what more often than not brought me to a point of poignancy, was what I saw both with my peers who decided to do the real doctor thing and devote their lives to saving lives. The MDs in my life are suspiciously plentiful - my very first love from those days when I didn't even know what kind of person I wanted to be is now a prominent attending physician in a hospital that is affiliated with that one famous school in Boston (yeah, that one), and even my peers in my current circles who went the MD route have done exceptionally well for themselves - wait, am I the odd one out? They're helping people and I...well I guess made the rich guys and gals of the world just a bit richer. Fuck.
Anyway. The thrust of their lives is what I'm focused on. Take for instance match day for MDs - the day where medical school kids, after decades of hard work, sweat, tears, boundless insecurity, and constant ironborn perseverance, find out where they will spend the next four years post grad as resident physicians (yes, just like Scrubs or House, but also 1000% not like that). Every school memorializes that day - livestreams of the reveal, interviews with students, countless photos of students, their families, their loved ones, their children (!) in still moments of pure, often tearful joy at this next chapter. I matched in orthopedic surgery at UChicago. I matched in internal medicine at Baylor. I matched in cardiology at Columbia (wink wink to the A+E readers, can't stop won't stop). Even my mother, a physician in her own right, recalls the day she matched - an event she described to me as one of the happiest and scariest days of her life, one that established the start of a long and fulfilling career in the service of others.
Now. Why bring this up? I'm not a doctor (or at least not that kind of doctor), why would I care about what my well-heeled peers get to do? Don't I have better things to do?
Well, that's exactly it, no? Better things to do. I share this because for years, my predictably slime person attitude was all about the flair and spectacle - god damn, I love the forest green of your Harvard divinity loops signifying you're now a hot shit MD. Fuck me, your Stanford overcoat gown with the green inlay makes you look like a fearsome yet benevolent medical wizard, a young Yen Sid with a penchant for healing. That hospital you're going to is legendary, isn't that one super famous doctor there who did this and that. Never did I give a real substantive thought to what that all really meant, once the spectacle wrapped, the gowns and trappings packed away, the photos developed and framed, the memories faded into those clouds in the deep crevasses of our brain.
Why is that? Simple - for me and my closest cadre, none of us had any inkling about the pursuit of helping people. We were excited about being unreasonably compensated in all the right ways, wining and dining, getting suited up to fuck shit up, being young and reckless and meme-worthy but still rocking it. Respectable drive for a young lawyer maybe, but...just tinged with something that I can only describe as a sad shallowness. Not even the promise of pro bono work (which none of us did btw - we were too busy helping rich folks get richer) was enticing enough to convince us otherwise, or even pretend we could enlighten ourselves in a meaningful way.
Tying it up, what is the point here? Did I get lost again?
No, not really. The point is that during this time of emergence, of new beginnings, I am always reminded of what my beginning was, and how...truly fruitless it was in practice. How excited I was to be important, and how quickly I realized how unimportant I was, even amid the trappings and corridors where I knew important things (including important things I did!) were happening. Meanwhile, my peers who went another route, one more noble, whether it was to do justice, or to really help people - to hone their craft, ease suffering, be meaningful, had begun in earnest. Maybe I had a lovely office, incredibly quippy coworkers who I trusted and swore by as a result of deep trauma bonding during shit work weeks (of which there were so, so many lol), maybe I was objectively wealthy, but...
I just...didn't think I'd realize so quickly how little that all meant. How much it affected me, changed me, made me into someone I didn't like, someone my now-wife resented?
What could have been if I had been smarter, more willing to let my talent be in the service of actually deserving people. If I had been brave enough to do something that wasn't solely focused on the flair of it all.
That, dear void, is the point. Why I do what I do now, why I have committed myself to helping others (because yes, I do work for you after all), not only to better myself, but perhaps to convince myself that I can remedy what time I wasted trying to be a shill. Every year, I remind myself that this is why it (work?) matters, why I matter, why this pursuit of mine, my love of what I do day in and day out is and always will be worth it. It has to, after all.
Why would anyone in their right mind be a lawyer if it wasn't truly meaningful?
Springtime vibes indeed. Cheers, folks.
