Futurelawyer

Grass Analogies - Not Always Greener

Execupundit.com: The Unaddressed and the Undiscovered. Don't let the grass grow under your feet. The grass is always greener on the other side. Cut your grass before the neighbors complain. I could go on. But, I think you get the picture. As metaphors go, grass is one of the oldies but goodies. However, the point made by Michael Wade in this post is important. It aligns well with the new trendy emphasis in lawyering on "mindfulness" and "meditation". Both involve concentrating on what is right in front of us, and being present in the moment. Do your job. Do it well. Fate and the future will take care of themselves.

Today You Have 24 Hours...How Will You Spend It?

I love this Sandburg quote. Treat time like money. You get to decide how you will spend it. But, once spent, it is gone forever.

#SundayMeditation - Chasing Fame And Awards Is A Fools Errand

What Did The Stoics Think About Fame?. “Consider the lives led once by others, long ago, the lives to be led by others after you, the lives led even now, in foreign lands. How many people don’t even know your name. How many will soon have forgotten it. How many offer you praise now—and tomorrow, perhaps, contempt. That to be remembered is worthless. Like fame. Like everything. People who are excited by posthumous fame forget that the people who remember them will soon die too. And those after them in turn. Until their memory, passed from one to another like a candle flame, gutters and goes out.” 

                                             Marcus Aurelius

#TBT - The Man In Black

I tend to wear black a lot. I write about death a lot. I have faced death myself, and lived with it in loved ones. However, I tend to live each day joyfully and gratefully. This is not a contradiction. In fact, I try to remember, at all times, the Stoic phrase "Memento Mori". Remember you will die, and you will live. Johnny Cash knew this. It occurs to me that I admire him more than I care to admit. In his words:

"I am not obsessed with death. I'm obsessed with living. The battle against the dark one and the clinging to the right one is what my life is about. In '88, when I had bypass surgery, I was as close to death as you could get. The doctors were saying they were losing me. I was going, and there was that wonderful light that I was going into. It was awesome, indescribable — beauty and peace, love and joy — and then all of a sudden, there I was again, all in pain and awake. I was so disappointed. But when I realized a day or so later what point I had been to, I started thanking God for life and thinking only of life.”

Johnny Cash.

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#MondayMorningWisdom - No Easy Answers

As we prepare for another week, and since we all hate Mondays, it is time for some wisdom to begin the week. Sorry, it isn't more satisfying. But, hey, that's life.

Rat Writes A Self Help Book

Sometimes philosophy isn't about living a good life.

Isn't Death Great?

We are all going to die. Isn't that great? Great, you say? What a horrible thing to say. How sad. How tragic. Life is wonderful. Who wants to think about dying? Well, children, think about it. The Stoics have a phrase: "Memento Mori", to remind us that we need to contemplate our deaths at all times. That way, we will make better choices about how we live. In fact, in addition to death being inevitable (met any immortals lately?), it is the ultimate answer to our most pressing questions. Want to know whether there is life after death? You have to die first. What to know what is on the other side of midnight? Die and find out. Want to answer to all your questions? And, I mean all. Die and find out. Death is the answer. Life is the question. Now, go out and live it up today. It's the only day you get.

Where The Spirit Meets The Bone

Miller Williams Was A Poet.
Miller Williams, American poet and my professor in College at Loyola University of the South in the late Sixties, passed away recently. I was thinking recently about my writing, both poetry and otherwise, and remembered what he used to say: "Every word you add dilutes the meaning". He believed in simple, conversational tone, and realized that most meaning derived by a reader comes from their own heart; not from a bunch of words. He also was a gentle soul, and hated war and violence. We once spent two weeks analyzing a single poem, Randall Jarrell's "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner", the last line of which stays with me today: "When he died, they washed him out of the turret with a hose". Miller Williams didn't teach me how to write. He taught me how to live. 

I wrote those words four years ago, before my heart surgery, Jacquelyn's illness and death, and good days and bad. I understand them better today. I miss Miller Williams. He was a great American poet; but, he was also a Stoic. He put into words that modern ears can hear and understand, the words of Stoic philosophers. Phrases that resonate in poetic terms: "You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone."

Miller Williams, RIP

No Time To Waste

You Are Human - You Get To Choose

Ryan Holiday writes today about choice. It is uniquely human to have choice. We can choose to be good or evil. And, we get the same choice every day. So, human, choose.

"Epictetus said that our “most efficacious gift,” what distinguishes humans from other animals, the essence of human nature, is the faculty of choice. Each person has the choice to be good or bad, to love or hate, to be strong or weak, brave or cowardly. Marcus Aurelius’s writings are, in a sense, his wrestling with making the right choices. They are his attempt to answer the incredibly difficult question he had been confronted with as a result of circumstances he didn’t choose: You have been made emperor, what kind of emperor will you be? What kind of person will you be?

“I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil,” Marcus wrote, “and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own.” We have good and evil, beauty and ugliness, in each of us. The question today is which are you going to choose to lean toward? What are you going to choose to cultivate? The choice is yours.

And the answer is everything"