Lawyers Appreciate Year-End Appreciation Memes
Stephanie West Allen at Idealawg and Julie Fleming Brown at Life at the Bar launched their Second Annual Lawyers Appreciate Meme Tag yesterday, asking tagged attorney bloggers to post on professional appreciation.
Stephanie tagged me, Gini Nelson at Engaging Conflicts, and Diane Levin of Online Guide to Mediation.
The idea is simple Legal bloggers end the year with a note of gratitude by writing a post on what lawyers appreciate and passing the meme baton along to lawyers whose blogs you appreciate.
I'm going "off ADR campus" this year to tag lawyer-bloggers Anne Reed at Deliberations; Diana Skaggs at the Louisville Divorce Law Journal and Law School Professor Antoinette Sedillo Lopez at the Best Practices for Legal Education Blog.
Why I Appreciate Gratitude Meme Tag Games
"Gratitude lists" are one of those self-help techniques at which I used to scoff. That was in the Pynchon Cynical Age, which lasted far too long past adolescence. During what I'll call late adulthood, I learned the following about gratitude lists:
- they bring you back to reality when you're about to whine about how much more other people are making than you; how unlucky you are to have been "raised by wolverines" (h/t to Nathan Lane); how much better you could be doing if you were (pick one) younger, older, slimmer, prettier, male, female, caucasion, African American; European; better schooled; better loved; more athletic; less prone to anger, accomodation, submission, etc., etc., etc.
- they remind you how frankly embarrassing it is to complain about life circumstances when you have the privilege of practicing law.
- incoming anecdote -- I once took a few minutes in a group session to complain about life with my law partners at a time when I was making more money in a single year than my parents -- at my age -- had made in their lifetimes. After I'd completed my tale of woe du jour, a willowly young Latino woman stood up and said she "really related" to what I was saying because the previous year when she'd been making a documentary about her South American villiage, it was destroyed by the eruption of a nearby volcano.
- Point taken -- If I've not being grateful, I'm not paying attention
- gratitude lists are most beneficial when you least want to make them, i.e., when you'd really rather nurture a sense of injustice. Today, whenever I'm in danger of doing that, I recall the documentary film maker and my self regard transforms itself into the desire to be of service to others.
The Year-End Appreciation Meme Temporarily Releases Litigators from the Bondage of Complaint
- whether we litigators were contentious and complaining before we started practice, we had no choice but to complain after we began litigating -- since all litigation literally commences with a "Complaint."
- when people used to ask me what it was like to litigate, this is what I said: every morning someone who is being paid extremely well gets up with the sole purpose of making me wrong; of proving that I am stupid, disingenuous, ill-tempered, dishonest, of bad faith or just generally evil. I, in turn, get up with the same purpose.
- Gratitude meme tags release us, ever so briefly, from the emotional and spiritual assaults of the daily giving and receiving of complaints.
Gratitude Meme Tags Allow Me to Work Collaboratively with Other Legal Bloggers
This benefit of the meme tag needs no explanation. I can only say that legal bloggers do all of us an extraordinary service every working day. They freely share, without expectation or hope of recompense, the increasingly complex and arcane knowledge they have gathered and learned at depth. I used to mistrust Witkin, as I was taught by my first mentors to do. Today, I confidently turn to the legal blogosphere to obtain legal niche theory and practice from some of the best minds working today.
You just can't beat that.
Happy holidays and a great New Year to every legal blogger sharing his or her expertise with the rest of us without any reward other than the occasional inspirational year-end meme tag.
