It is 9:45 pm on a Sunday night in the summer, six years into retirement. I have just completed a day of doing exactly what I wanted to do, which was not much. Saturday was much the same.
This weekend was nothing like my weekends when I practiced law.
On a typical weekend when I was a partner in a law firm, I would have taken Saturday off (unless I had a deal closing soon or was under the gun to meet a deadline). By about 3 pm on Sunday, I would have started feeling nervous about what I had to deal with on Monday morning. Sometime after that, I would likely have gone into my home office for a couple of hours to be sure that I was ready for Monday morning.
Of course, that was better than my typical weekend when I was an Associate in a law firm. In those days, on Sunday I would still be trying to relax after having worked much of Saturday. On a good weekend, I would be feeling almost chill before that nervous feeling started around 3 pm.
Back in the day, I believed that being under constant stress was just part of the legal profession, and that if you could not handle the stress, you should find another line of work. I don’t believe that anymore. I now believe that being under constant stress is just an indication that you bought into the lies that partners told you, and that you chose to blindly follow the money instead of looking for a healthier way to practice.
And yes, of course there are times that you have to go flat out because a court date or a closing is looming. I am not talking about the sprints that are part of being a lawyer. I am talking about the marathon. It does not have to be as tough as it is for so many of us.