The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Happy 5768! Thursday was the Jewish New Year. I didn't make it to services, but I did stay home for the day and performed one of my favorite rituals, tashlich.

For tashlich one goes to a flowing body of water and casts off breadcrumbs as a symbolic way of casting off one's sins. Since I live on a flowing body of water, this was a very convenient ritual. But I didn't want to just throw my sins out the window, as they'd just wash right back up on our porch, and that would seem to defeat the purpose. So I instead boarded the kayak and paddled out to the middle of Richardson Bay.

It was one of those gorgeous early Fall days out on the Bay, one of my favorite places to be meditative. In many ways this is a time of great newness for me, and I took some time to think about it. With the completion of the last of those CLEs an enormous fog has finally been lifted. It's a fog I've been in for years, all through law school and its year-long aftermath as I've been racing around doing everything I needed to do before I could finally start living this new life as a lawyer. Now, though, that all the CLEs and (hopefully!) bar exams are behind me it looks like I'll never need to do legal homework ever again. It's very freeing to finally get to think about what I'd like to have in my life instead.

I've already got some ideas, and I'll probably take some more time in the coming days to be reflective about where I've come from and where I'm going. But tashlich for me was part of that process, where I cast off not sins so much, per se, but aspects of my character that I wish to improve as I set forth on this new life.

Out there on the bay I had taken out two slices of bread. I'm not sure if that means I'm so shallow as to think I don't need a whole loaf to do the job, or if it suggests I'm so neurotic as to require all the pieces that two whole slices would afford. Either way, however, this is what I thought was necessary to get what I wanted from the experience.

I began by tearing a strip, tossing it, then paddling on. All went well with this, until the seagulls got wind of what I was doing. Something you should realize is how close Richardson Bay is to Bodega Bay, which is where Hitchcock's The Birds was filmed. So you can understand my discomfort when I'm suddenly followed by a squadron of seagulls trying to eat my sins...