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On Connections and Intentions
From separate corners of the legal blogosphere yesterday come two meditations on balancing life and lawyering.
One considers the importance of connections, the other considers intentions.
For Arnie Herz at Legal Sanity, changes in his two children's social connections inspire thoughts about connections in lawyers' lives. As each child prepares to move up to a new school in September, Herz observes how they find security and happiness in their relationships with other children who share common interests.
Lawyers, too, can "thrive on such interest-based connections," Herz believes. Many lawyers tell Herz that they feel isolated and lonely even through they are surrounded by any number of co-workers every day. Law firms can address this lack of esprit de corps, he believes, through broader encouragement of affinity groups -- not just built around common denominators such as race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation but around any number of shared interests: books, travel, music.
"Regardless of their focus, they hold great potential for fostering the kind of employee bonds that compel career contentment and thwart attrition."
Family also provided the inspiration for Ernest Svenson's mediation at Ernie the Attorney. In his case, it was an introspective e-mail from his brother on his hard road to learning the lesson, "We're all responsible for our own successes and failures." Says Svenson:
"I'm still learning this lesson, which is unfortunate, but at least I'm narrowing down the list of people who I can fault for my failures. I'm down to one."
Rather than focus on blame, Svenson decides to act, waking yesterday at 5:45 a.m. to resume theyoga class he'd stopped many months earlier. It was the same instructor, one who'd started every class by asking everyone to examine their intentions. Until yesterday, Svenson wrote, he had never understood what the instructor meant by that. Then yesterday, he said, he finally understood: "The question is not what we are, but what we're going to do about it."
Posted by Robert J. Ambrogi on June 20, 2006 at 05:20 PM | Permalink
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