While I enjoyed practicing law for many years, I recently retired. I never lost my zest for serving others, but the administrative requirements of modern law practice finally got to the point where I was no longer having fun – the dictates of being a business having overwhelmed the pleasures of being a member of an honored profession. Having said for years that I would practice as long as I was having fun, I chose to honor that statement and made my escape.
I haven’t really missed law practice as I have much to do in retirement. I still serve on charitable boards and have many hobbies – such as keeping this blog – that keep me fully occupied. My retirement has also freed Helen and me to do some things we never seemed to have time for when I was working, such as our recent European river cruise. All in all, I haven’t missed practice, and that has been somewhat surprising to me considering all the fun I had for many years assisting others in chasing their dreams.
What I have missed, however, is talking to my friends. For my former clients largely fit into two classifications: friends of mine who needed legal services of a kind requiring effort beyond those of simple courtesies and who turned to me for assistance; or business clients who began as clients but became friends with the passage of time due to our communal strivings. There were a few clients that I never considered as friends, but they were rare birds indeed. The vast majority of my former clients were friends and remain friends to this day. I have missed speaking to them on a regular basis and keeping current with their personal stories and sagas.
Yesterday, I hit the jackpot. Helen and I had dinner scheduled with one long-time client and there was some possibility he and his wife might be come to the house afterward, so while Helen went over to her mother’s house to help prepare it for sale, I stayed home to clean and straighten. Just as I was hanging a picture I’d finally found a place for in the Library, the phone rang. I answered to discover the caller was a long time Canadian client who has been retired for three years. He was calling to see how I have adjusted to my own retirement and to catch up on the news.
We talked for 20 minutes or so, mostly about mutual friends, personal interests, past and future travels, respective family matters and sorrows, and the joys of retirement. During our conversation, I realized that these sorts of conversations were what I missed most in my retirement and began to wonder why I hadn’t been the one to reach out and initiate the conversation. After all, each of our telephones is equipped with a means of dialing the other’s number. But he has the advantage of me; he has been retired longer and has developed the rhythm of calling old friends to keep in touch.
Dinner last evening with my other former client and his wife was equally joyful. We ate at an excellent small bistro and were surprised by a bottle of wine ‘phoned in’ by his mother by way of a thank you for a small something I’d done for her daughter. It hadn’t occurred to me not to assist or to demand payment, for I am a friend of the extremely extended family and one simply helps one’s friends: the mother was – and is – active in the family business, as is a daughter, an ex-wife, and two spouses (the one at dinner and the one attached to the ex-wife). This was a special dinner in other ways as well, for it was the first time all of us had gotten together in something other than a business setting – something we had both promised the other to do during our last, business related meeting. We have long enjoyed our business conversations, but simply hadn’t yet taken the relationship to a new and different level. Last night we began that journey.
Both of these men are good friends and their friendships are of the kind that come from successfully going through difficulties together and arriving on the other side with joy in a shared success. But the friendships might not have happened if we hadn’t shared similar backgrounds. None of us began life as scions of wealthy, successful families. To the contrary, each of us began life with nary a dime and, through a combination of brains, grit, energy, focus, desire, and education, were able to succeed at careers we came to believe in and love. There is a singular joy attached to being able to accomplish something of this sort, of knowing you can spread your wings and fly on your own, of realizing that you can fly with others toward a common goal.
For me, there was the added joy of helping other’s to spread their wings, for being of service has always had special meaning for me.
I received yet another call yesterday, this one from my blogging partner, Eliot. He called during a break in an elder hostel program on opera to tell me of something he’d learned by listening to a lecture on The Marriage of Figaro, something that reminded him of an event that occurred years ago when we were law partners. We had agreed to chair a segment of a firm planning session – Eliot refused to call these sessions retreats, maintaining stoutly that he’d never retreated in his life – and we’d decided to hold an Oxford style debate on the following topic: “We (lawyers) are servants, and highly paid for the privilege.” Eliot and I were both largely successful in our legal ventures, but the fates conspired to deny us success with this one. The reaction in the room upon our unveiling the topic was deadly, with almost everyone strongly adverse to the notion that lawyers were servants. One lawyer we both highly respected pounded emphatically on the table in front of him while declaring: “I went to law school for three years. I am no one’s servant.”
But, alas for him, we were servants – as, indeed, almost anyone in the world, regardless of occupation, wealth or position, is during at least some portion of his or her life. And why those in that far off room didn’t understand that to be of service is both a privilege and a joyful act is beyond my comprehension. How else could I have helped last evening’s dinner companion develop his start-up enterprise to the point where it could be sold for a sum that guaranteed all involved a full retirement? I had neither the funds to invest nor the expertise to assist directly in his business operations, but whatever legal savvy I provided was of material assistance to the team that made the success happen. How else could I have helped the morning’s caller grow an already substantial Canadian family owned business to become even larger and deal with the dreaded issue of family succession? Neither he nor I were owners of the business except in the sense that we each felt a sense of ownership and urgency, the kind of ownership and urgency which arises out of the privilege of service: his feelings arising from being the first non-family member to be asked to be the CEO of the company; mine arising from the honor of having been given responsibility, from having been asked to be the family’s US counsel, at a time when I had practiced law less than 10 years.
I enjoyed heady business years with both of my friends, years in which we overcame many obstacles together, years in which we fashioned many successes together. I always had to be cognizant that my friends were running the risks using their own capital or directing the family’s business operations, and that they knew the basics of their respective businesses far better than I. My job was to assist with legal concerns, to cooperate with the other service professionals who felt toward these clients as I did from their own, respective viewpoints. And so it was that all of us – owners, executives, and fellow service professionals alike – were part of a group taking on life one challenge at a time and having a great deal of fun in the bargain.
Eliot appreciates both the joy of serving – for he was superb at his work, level-headed, calm, supportive, and capable of delivering practical solutions to difficult issues – and the irony of good lawyers not understanding that they were, by definition, in service to others. His call was motivated both by the collective head shaking each of us has engaged in over the years since that long ago planning session and by a new thought about what we might have said to achieve a different result than the one we ‘enjoyed’. I was inclined in yesterday’s conversation to think that we did try the tactic he was suggesting and told Eliot so. On reflection after our call was completed, I realized that Eliot, at age 90, was still being Eliot – still worrying the issues, still looking for and suggesting solutions, still caring in ways that only friends can care for one another, still seeking for a way to reach the blockheads incapable of comprehending the joys of service.
Yesterday was a banner day for me, for many old friends were heard from outside of the context of business. We spoke with one another, we broke bread with one another, we bantered with one another – all for no reason other than the simple joy of friendship. Each of our friendships has surpassed a relationship based upon nothing other than the conduct of business, primarily because of the joy of engagement that each of us shared while engaged in those self-same business matters. Â We like each other due to our shared successes in the joys of the communal hunt. We respect each other because each of us has the ability to make something happen; we respect each other because each of us understands that the others perfected their ability to make something happen by pulling themselves up from humble beginnings with their own bootstraps; we respect each other for coming to understand and believe that hunting in packs is far more interesting, far more complex, and far more enjoyable than hunting alone.
And in the end, it is our friendships that sustain us, not the long ago challenges of business. For in friendship we serve one another by making life a thing of joy rather than a thing of desperation.
