Sudoku Warrior

What is Sudoku?

Yesterday afternoon I had lunch with my mentor from the Multnomah Bar Association. She's an absolutely delightful woman with years of experience. In addition, she's a partner at a prestigious firm in downtown Portland and seems to know nearly all the other attorneys in town. What luck!

As we were sitting in the French restaurant at which her firm treated us, I asked her about her experience as a partner. She explained that in order to get 2 weeks vacation and approximately another week for the usual holidays, she worked 10-12 hour days. Her billable hour requirement was also significantly lower than that of the San Francisco office of the firm. Fortunately, she explained, she was unmarried and didn't have any children because her free time was limited enough.

So, my question is, at what point am I willing to sacrifice a personal life and pursuits to become "successful" in the traditional attorney sense? I've seen more than a handful of people from law school and friends from other fields, especially medicine and business (are those really distinct fields???) willing to lay their humanity upon the sacrificial altar. (Quite frankly, I'm not so certain they seem content, although, granted, I don't get to see them on their absolutely fabulous 2-3 week vacations once a year and it's possible their solitude-preferring spouses are.)

I realized that her schedule had no appeal to me whatsoever, which made me wonder if I was just lazy. I had a professor in law school, a Harvard grad who worked as a federal prosecutor in NY (in fact, he had put away mobsters, so I was convinced he was out in Oregon on the witness protection program), who told the class that work was his first priority. Yes, "W-O-R-K;" not: improving the legal system, representing the underprivileged, defining the ubiquitous term - 'justice,' achieving world peace via international law, etc... Up until that point, I figured the people who actually believed that still lied saying, "family," "country," or "religion," just to avoid having the rest of us think they belonged in the asylum--the same way expecting parents all say "we just want a healthy baby" when we all know what they really long for is a little Einstein-Miss America/Heisman trophy-gold medal superstar.

Like most, I long for meaningful, make-a-difference work (which I haven't yet found) but at the end of the day, I want to go home and I want to get there before I'm utterly exhausted and worn out. How about weekends that are enjoyable, not simply about catching up on sleep or heading back to the office?

In one of my favorite books, Man's Search for Meaning, the author writes, "experiencing can be as valuable as achieving," and, as they say on NPR, 'this I believe.'