Sunday, January 23, 2011

        
                                       REASON ENOUGH TO WRITE

         If truth is the Holy Grail, twenty-five years of marathons and law practice have proven me to be the Don Quixote of both disciplines. Armed with a lance of logic, my quest was doomed from the start.
         In law school we were thought to “think like lawyers”… code for bludgeon the facts into submission with reason and analytics. I loosed these weapons on my chosen profession and sport for a quarter century. No windmill was safe. 
          Reason was my Alexandrian solution to every challenge, cool and cutting. Gordian or not, no knot was immune. For faster marathons, embrace the training schedule. For legal victories, master the civil code. There were manuals for everything, organized, fool proof, logical. Mine was the generation that never colored outside the lines, rewarded for restraint, punished for passion.
           Analytics honed my spear. The object of my quest morphed from truth to treasure. I pierced anything for a fee.
            Finally, no race time was fast enough, no deal big enough, to move the needle. Personal records were eclipsed by age and legal victories by conscience.  My truth emerged, cold and empty. Reason had created its own trap. A commanding tool in an analytical world, in the end its price was passion. 
          There’d been hints along the way, unexpected whispers from the heart of humankind…“God’s speed John Glenn.” “Can’t we all just get along?” Over the roar of a bottom line, high tech world even I heard these faint voices. Not the stuff of bigger verdicts or faster finishes, I ignored them.
           Eventually, when the music stopped my weapon was worthless. The relevance of my law books had waned with each judicial ruling, while epic works like the Bible, containing nothing of logic or argument and relying solely on proverbs, stories, and examples, had remainded timeless.
          I realized that the most important passages of my life were penned before the quest began, by my heart not my hand. The truth I sought was not a new thing to be discovered, it was something that had  been there all along.    
          So, here begins my journey back to the start, to a time when all things were possible...and truth a way of life.       


7 comments:

  1. Welcome to the new path. I'm looking forward to following you on this journey!

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  2. Spoken like a poet on endorphins.

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  3. First an article, then a blog. Let me be the first to say that I expect an autographed copy of the book!

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  4. First an article, then a blog. What's next? A book.

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  5. Excellent Mac. I look forward to reading about your journey.

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  6. If the excitement spawned off living life through analytics and reason are akin to a child lighting a bottle rocket for the first time on the Fourth of July, then the discovery of passion and truth in life is like the excitement felt from viewing the launch of the space shuttle from the pilot's seat! Go Mack Go!

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