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November 22, 2006
Real life, courage and gratitude.
WAC? is about happy clients--and how hard it is to get client service right. It's also about happy lawyers, a prerequiste to good service: family, friends, rest, food, exercise, health, renewal, and a spiritual life. But WAC? has limitations. For example, Real Life, which happens to us and those we love, is cruelly shortchanged in this blog.
So, if I were going to read just one overall blog to meet all my life-and-lawyer needs, it would be Ray Ward's at Minor Wisdom. A New Orleans lawyer, Ray just did his 1000th post at Minor Wisdom, a blog which grabbed me when I started reading blogs 18 months ago because it was what I thought a blog should be: brave, personal, well-written and damn interesting. A gifted and well-rounded human and lawyer, perhaps put here on Earth to make up for some of the rest of us, Ray writes on everything from excellence in lawyering, writing and appellate advocacy to Christian mystics, politics, music (well, real music), Katrina, Darfur and Chad, human rights, and plain rites. The guy knows we are all just here for a cup of coffee--so make the best of it, help others, increase love. He has things to share, and a sense of humour. He never moralizes. He's curious. And fear seems truly to have been replaced by faith.
Shucks, Ray thinks when he reads this--but I ain't done yet. Themes of human potential, growth, real class and courage--things you want to see in blogs, humans and lawyers--run energetically, lovingly, through his posts. And Ray has also written about lawyers and depression, which plagues the legal profession more than others, and has written about it, and passionately, several times. How he knows this subject evades me. Me? Well, I know some things, in my case personally, about alcohol abuse. I have written about it once in "Born Lucky". I should have the stones to write about it more. Twenty years without a Heineken, shot glasses of Jamesons or even wine with dinner does not make me superior, immune or even well. I have a responsibility to tell others about my turning my hardships and defeats into opportunities for growth. Bad cards, or bad choices in life, can have big rewards; they are worth talking about. They teach. For whatever reason, this Ray Ward knows well. I'm grateful to him for the reminder.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Posted by JD Hull at November 22, 2006 11:58 PM