Once while on a flight to Washington, D.C. I got up to use the restroom and the next thing I knew, I was in the back galley of the airplane with two flight attendants standing over me, looking concerned. One woman kept repeating, “Are you okay?” Piecing together the conversations between the flight attendants and the passenger (who was standing behind me), I learned that I had lost consciousness and fortunately, didn’t hit my head on my way down. A few minutes later, after a healthy dose of orange juice, I stood up and once again lost consciousness. It turns out, this is not that uncommon amongst passengers during flights.
In that moment when I lost consciousness, the thought that flashed through my mind was, “Hmm, I wonder if this is how one dies.” The experience made me revisit a topic I think about quite often — death and dying.
I explored the topic of death and dying over on my Forbes column, but for this post, I want to talk about the time between this moment and death. I’ve exchanged messages and interviewed people who are intimately in contact with death — trauma surgeons, funeral directors, caregivers, palliative care professionals, etc., and the common theme that I saw emerge is this: thinking about death forces us to think about how we are living.
Which brings me to joy. I’m not sure why, but many lawyers fear joy. According to Professor Nehal Patel, lawyers also fear love. I think this is because lawyers see happy emotions as trite. As though our work as lawyers can only be meaningful if it’s full of suffering and misery.
I want to challenge this belief. Now, before you get all defensive and tell me how defending someone facing the death penalty isn’t about kittens, puppies, and rainbows, let me explain.
As lawyers, we’re trained to hyper-focus on all the things that are wrong and can go wrong. This is probably why so many lawyers suffer from anxiety, stress, depression, and other mental health issues. We need a mechanism to counteract this automatic thinking. If you’re constantly steeped in the pain of your clients, if you lose yourself in their suffering, you can’t be an effective advocate for your clients.
This is why mindfulness is so important. Mindfulness, which at its core is being committed to the moment-to-moment experience of what is happening, forces us to have a more measured and appropriate response to life events.
I find that so many lawyers don’t have an “off button.” They’re constantly hostile and aggressive. In order to counteract this, I believe we need to be mindful of our own mental state. Choosing joy isn’t nearly as simple, easy, or trite as the curmudgeons would have you believe.
It takes courage to say that despite the many reasons to feel angry, hostile, or irate, I’ll choose my response. Despite all that is wrong in the world, there is still hope. There’s reason to feel joy.
My friend Diana Maier, an employment and privacy counsel and a longtime meditation practitioner, recently wrote about joy in the legal profession. She shared:
“Generally, when you think of lawyers, you think of contentious, money-oriented professionals who like to muscle their way through most every situation. You might be surprised at how many lawyers there are like myself who went to law school to perform direct service work for individuals (to ‘help people,’ the aphorism goes), and thought the legal system would be a powerful forum in which to do that work.
My leading a joyful professional life, or finding meaning in how I earn an income, has been possible through the law. What’s even better, over the 27 years that I’ve been practicing meditation, I’ve been able to increasingly integrate the principles of mindfulness and kindness into my legal work. It is, admittedly, not an easy thing to do in a profession that prides itself on being aggressive and confrontational, but it is possible. For me, it means working with clients whose values match mine, or when they don’t, trying to hold the space of calmness, rationality, and big-picture thinking for clients dealing with intense anger and confusion.”
In her article, she explains her journey from public defender to plaintiff’s employment lawyer to doing employment defense work. This transition allowed her to find work that is aligned with her values — working with companies that want to create conscientious workplaces, while making time for her children. She’s consciously and intentionally choosing her career and the work she’ll be doing rather than allowing work to happen to her.
This isn’t to say any of this easy. Especially with the backbreaking student loans and other financial demands so many lawyers face (myself included), choosing joy can feel like a luxury that we cannot afford.
However, given that none of us are guaranteed the next moment, perhaps we should think more about how we want to live our lives, the impact we want to make, and the legacy we want to leave behind.
This article previously appeared on Above the Law.