"Change of Venue" for Busy Lawyers

Communicatrix Brings the Inspiration …

Communicatrix has me at … well, whatever her first word happens to be, but this post is particularly near and dear to my heart. Colleen’s got a way, like me (I’ve been told), of cutting to the point pretty directly (when properly motivated — me, I mean — Colleen seems to need no external motivation which makes it one of the many things about her I aspire to for myself); witness the “Stop. Sucking!” titles of her most recent posts. See what I mean? Direct. To the point.

She caught my eye with this “change of venue” post for two reasons:

1. The obvious lawyer reference. For any nonlawyers who happen to be tuning in, a change of venue is what lawyers seek in trials for certain reasons, the most popularly known being too much pretrial publicity in a criminal trial.
2. My weekend just past.

My Change of Venue

See, I had a change of venue myself this past weekend.

It seems to me that the previous 15 months, ever since the post-funereal re-start of my solo startup, have been nothing but nonstop work, punctuated more sporadically than I’d care to admit with home chores and parental errands.

Of the latter, virtually none were of the entertaining variety; every last blessed one was preceded by “I HAVE to have new socks, Mom!” or some such.

So, this past weekend, I’d decided that was quite enough of that, thankyouverymuch, and we were both due, the Princess and me, for an outing of the fun kind.

Not content with just one such outing, I made it three over the course of the weekend: a church-sponsored spring festival, a one-hour stint at a local fast-food restaurant with a playground that shall remain nameless and which I NEVER let her eat at (guess I can’t say that anymore); and two hours at the beach.

Here’s what I got out of this trifecta:

1. Sunburn on the upper chest and shoulders;
2. Back spasms from lugging the chairs, bags, and cooler over soft Atlantic sand;
3. A $60-lighter wallet, after all was said and done;
4. A permagrin from watching my kid discover at the gymnastics exhibit that she does indeed have some natural talent at something she wants desperately to do well;
5. A free SCUBA diving outing this summer (yay door prizes!);
6. Freshened-up sense of empowerment;
7. And a new sense of self.

There’s not much to be said for items 1 through 5 (though I’m totally posting pictures of #5 when it happens), but items 6 and 7 are worthy of further reflection.

Empowerment

When you enclose yourself into the walls of your office, or any four-sided structure of your choice, for a length of time, a strange thing happens: you start to feel like one of those caged animals whose keeper suddenly left the door open.

Quizzically staring out the window — what is that bright, shiny stuff out there coming from that glowing orb in the sky? It burns… — and feeling like so much of tomorrow’s sushi in the tidal wave of your work flow, it’s easy to begin to think of yourself, “This is me. This is all I do. I am what I endlessly do, endlessly.”

Or maybe that’s just me. At any rate, getting out of the house and actually doing something with no other purpose than having fun made a world of difference to me. It was almost a literal experience of that old cliche “recharging your batteries” — I could feel a surge of some new resource of energy, even as I grew exhausted from the beach-running, and the child-chasing. Not physical energy so much as mental at first, but this morning, I was surprised at how ready for the day I felt.

And then I promptly fell into bed at 12:25 PM for an after-lunch nap. Which is also good.

New Sense of Self

The other little goody I got from the weekend’s excursions: a refreshed image of who I am. I think, as a solo, I get caught up in the identification with that label. “I am a solo,” I think, and that begins to define me. What I forget — what we ALL forget, I think — is that this is not all that we are.

But this weekend, I got the reminder that there’s a whole person in this tired-at-the-end-of-the-day body, not just a lawyer or a coach or a blogger or a writer, but all that, and a mom, and a woman, and a would-be SCUBA diver, and a violin student, and an amateur artist, and a Democrat, and a former actor, and, and, and … and the indescribable and unknowable essence that is at the core of us all.

Bottom Line

I have a whole new appreciation for the exhortation to “take a break and just go have some fun!” Who knows what you’ll discover about yourself?

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