Oh now, goodness knows you might have done better
But then, Heaven knows you might have done worse
If you lit up the occasional candle
You’re allowed the occasional curse
Jesse Winchester, “All of Your Stories”, Third Down, 110 To Go
I spent the weekend in a remote portion of Humptulips County, the central mountainous part that is neither Eastern nor Western Washington and which serves as the dividing line between two completely different ecosystems and cultures. I was staying at a resort while in attendance at a firm meeting to discuss the future of the business law practice group of which I am part – a future in which I will play no role due to my impending retirement at year’s end.
As a result, I spent the weekend battling my personal demon. I have long been a partner in law firms in Seattle, with my first partnership dating to 1974. In my time as a partner, I have been heavily involved in all facets of the firms of which I was a part, both as a practicing lawyer with a significant book of business and as a heavily engaged participant in firm administration. I have managed two firms and served in a senior management position in a third, as well as continuously participating as a member of a wide variety of public boards which give back to this community in significant ways. In other words, I have always practiced law and participated in community life at full throttle, enjoying both my interaction with clients, partners, and fellow workers for the community’s health and happiness, all the while coping with the many challenges that face practicing lawyers and the communities within which they work.
I thoroughly enjoyed this experience and have no regrets. I had fun. I believe I gave as much to my profession, to my community and to my clients as I received in return, and I cannot think of summing up a career in any better way.
However, this weekend was quite different. While I had some minimal input into matters due to a series of conversations with others over the weeks prior to the meeting, I was not involved much in the actual meeting and spoke not at all in any public way. This was by deliberate choice for I felt that since we were meeting to discuss the future, those who will own that future should be given free rein to speak and those of us who represent the past ought to keep quiet, except to provide whatever occasional guidance we might be requested to offer on the perennially repetitious issues that plague the daily practice of law, decade-upon-decade.
Because these issues are ever-present and continuously debated year-after-year, staying silent in their presence wasn’t as difficult as I first imagined. In fact, I listened to some of the discussions with a great deal of internal amusement, remembering earlier versions of the same tussle populated by other participants than those present and in other rooms than the one in which I was physically located. Many of my former colleagues were with me over the course of the weekend’s meeting, unseen and unheard by anyone other than myself. Within their echoes lies my present firm’s future.
What has all of this to do with battling demons? My personal curse has always been to become as heavily involved as possible in anything I have ever tried. As my mother and father constantly preached to me while I was growing up: “Whatever you do, however important it is or it isn’t, do it the best way you know how and put your back into it.” I have been guided by this mantra my entire life, and, as a consequence, I found it a real battle to disengage from the meeting’s planning efforts as I had promised myself I would.
By the end of the first day’s meeting, I was tired and had a vision of myself as an old warhorse trying as hard as he might not to answer the bugle call to battle one last time. I don’t really think I understood that cliché very well at an emotional level until last weekend. It was only through constant self-reminders that the future under discussion was not mine that I was able to see how to apply my parent’s mantra. My highest and best use was staying silent while the owners of that future fought their way through to a vision. It was a hard, internally fought, self-defined battle for me to remain silent except when called upon for an opinion or comment, but I managed it in the end.
But the battle wasn’t yet over until the following morning. It was the setting in which we found ourselves that provided the basis for resolving the battle. At the back of the hotel is a deep ravine with the Chehalis River flowing through it, a ravine bordered by woods and paths. Amid those woods early on the morning of the second day (a morning which I had to myself, as the others were fast asleep recovering from the previous evening’s gaiety), I found a wooden viewing stand built upon the very edge of the ravine from which I could watch the river and the life that surrounds and depends upon it. It was there that I began to realize that this world I was viewing was very similar to the world to which I am moving as my professional life winds down. I was reminded by that view that my new world is one in which I will be free to do what I want to do when I want to do it, not what my parents, my partners, my colleagues or my clients want me to do at times of their choosing. In other words, I will finally have the freedom to be the sole governor my own days, a freedom I haven’t had since I took my first full-time job at age 13.
It was swallows flying over the ravine and along its slopes that ultimately let me see the solution to the demon haunting me in the meetings. As swallows do, they alternately dipped, soared and flew in short bursts of their wings looking for food, providing both entertainment and a metaphor for a free life cheerfully lived. And in their song was the call to a sort of freedom that I came to realize I was enthusiastically anticipating.
The kinds of things I have imagined doing next year are reminiscent of the swallow’s erratic flight. Since I have no wish to disappear from the world, I will continue board service (perhaps including a private board to the list with a company I am now talking to) and may take on a few related tasks. My real wish is to begin doing the things I have always intended to do but haven’t yet done due to the lack of energy I suffer after coming home from a full day: learning to play the guitar (I have the guitar and instruction materials in hand and practice has begun, albeit fitfully); writing the novel I have always planned (I have the outline finished and the first chapter written); making our land more of a working farm and helping Helen maintain it (I don’t have the requisite blisters yet, but I know where to find them); and walking the borders of our land to watch all of the forms of life that share it with my present stewardship (the stand in our entryway already contains all of the walking sticks necessary for the purpose).
In other words, I am ready and only await the event. And, after this weekend and the lesson taught by the swallows, the path forward is clear.
Swallows will continue to point my way. Our swallows (barn swallows, as opposed to whatever breed that was on the mountain with their white striped wings) always accompany me in the Summer months when I am cutting grass with the big tractor, dipping and swooping in front of each passage along the edge of the uncut portion of the fields while seeking the insects that inevitably rise in response of the tractor’s roar and thump.
Who knows what I will truly accomplish in this next passage. It will depend, as it always has, upon me and upon the will that drives me. With any luck and with a modicum of effort (and an occasional reminder from the swallows), I may yet put the lie to the old saw that old dogs cannot learn new tricks.
