Life as a 2L is ridiculously intense. I feel like I live 6 lives in the span of one day. Things that happened just last week feel like they transpired a year ago.
In some ways the intensity is my own fault. I overloaded my schedule, for one, and I still like to take advantage of other interesting opportunities that pop up. Last Wednesday, for example, I saw a presentation by Judge Posner at our school, and on Monday, in addition from classes from 8:30 to 5:00 almost non-stop, I still went to a brown bag lecture on the human rights violations at Guantanamo Bay. That actually was hard to sit through – it was disturbing material, and I was worn down and had little emotional fortitude to protect myself from being paralyzed with depressing thoughts about the state of our world.
But some of the intensity – and by intensity I don't just mean the hours required and the difficulty of the mental labor involved, but also the variety of subject areas my brain is constantly required to devote attention to – is not my doing. Becoming a lawyer demands paradoxical applications of energy: for instance, I am expected to do well in school, and simultaneously I am also expected to find a job. These ends are mutually exclusive goals given how demanding of time each one of them is. There is only so much of me to go around, energy-wise, and even if I were able to operate at 100% every moment (of course what human is) there are still only so many hours in the day.
It dawns on me though that maybe the law school regimen is purposefully designed to be like this. Maybe as a lawyer I will find myself pulled in so many directions, with so many different things requiring my full intellectual powers and attention. Maybe the purpose of law school is not to learn law so much as to simply train the brain to handle constant full-throttle use, to push it to mental exhaustion and then be able to keep going. Like with weight lifting, when strength is built by working to muscle failure and then doing some more, ultimately increasing stamina.
I'm not particularly complaining about this though. I find the intensity exciting in a way. I like the vibrance to my day. It's just that sometimes it would be nice to be able to press pause.
Due to the aforementioned busy-ness, not posted until 10/28.