Esther Perel recently said something on her podcast on Work Relationships that pricked my ears – “When you’re in that [anxious], vigilant state, you can’t be exploratory, playful, curious, imaginative, creative, innovative.”
All of a sudden I am flourishing. All of a sudden all I want to do is write, and sew, and play guitar, and write songs.
There is a woman in the semi-professional choir that I am a part of – a professional opera singer herself (retired). She is holding extra, free lessons for a woman’s ensemble, and I’ve been attending. Sometimes there are just a small number of us there, and then we get extra personal attention. Today was one of those days, and when it was my turn she said “let’s see what happens if you just open your mouth and let it out,” and she led me up the scales, higher and higher and “are you sure about this??” level high to a place in the Disney Princess Register that this Alto never goes. I blew her hair back, and it felt GREAT. I said sheepishly “I’m an Alto II,” and she said “I’d rethink that.” A few weeks ago, I would have had neither the time nor the energy for this special treat. I’m relishing it.
Recently the firm hosted an absolutely fascinating training on implicit bias by a neuroscientist and researcher who spoke almost exclusively about brain chemistry and social science research. She did an exercise asking us to name the colors we saw aloud in a timed test (blue, red, purple). And then she asked us to do it again – only this time, she put up the word (i.e. “blue”), but made the font itself a different color (red, for example). We cannot look at the word blue and say “red” very quickly – we see “blue,” think “blue,” remember that we were asked not to read the word but to shout the color of the word, think “red,” and then say “red.” It takes forever to go through that chain of thought. She told us that we would never get any faster at it, because reading is automatic and we will always, ALWAYS read it first. As we went through that exercise and many more, she reminded us that in a typical day we only spend a certain amount of our time actively thinking. Something like 90% of what our brain processes each day is automatic (i.e., reading “blue,”), and maybe 10% of our brain process is actual thinking really hard (correcting yourself to say “red”). Her point was that even if folks recognize implicit bias, it’s almost impossible to stamp it out through sheer force of will in day to day conduct, so instead we need to think of ways to put structures in place to circumvent it (like the famous orchestra blind-auditions experiment that showed that if steps are taken to screen the gender of auditioning musicians, the resulting orchestra is going to have a lot more women in it).
All of us in the room had another observation, though. BigLaw requires constant, endless vigilance – relentless deep and difficult thinking. We are paid by the tenth of an hour and a client will not pay any single six minutes where you are not doing deep and difficult thinking. The result is that we have to tax our brains far more than the average human – we are doing the equivalent of saying the color “red” when we see the word “blue” all day long. It depletes. There is nothing leftover, ever, and if we have a day off we’re all desperately cramming in rest to try to recharge a month’s worth of brain rest in a single day. This is why lawyers are all assholes.
As I’ve enjoyed the reduced billing over the last few weeks, and my “anxious, vigilant state” has relaxed, Mme. Perel’s observation has come bursting forth – once again I feel exploratory, playful, curious, imaginative, creative, innovative – once again I have access to all of the patience and hunger and interest I used to have. It’s so glorious. Man, if I survive that long I am going to ROCK retirement, I tell you.
Today was my last day at my current firm. In a few days, I will start at the new one – a lower billable requirement, a higher title, and hopefully more autonomy. In the few days between, though, I am going to work on soaring in the Disney Princess Register, literally and figuratively, and enjoy every second of this burst of creative exploration that I have so missed over the past couple of years.